By Paths Coincident
by Honorat
Summary: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren't the only members of the two teams who've met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark.
1. Chapter 1

Title: By Paths Coincident 1/?

Author: Honorat

Rating: T

Characters: Jenkins, Eve Baird, Jacob Stone, Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, Parker, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Others TBA as needed.

Pairing: Parker/Hardison

Disclaimer: Dean Devlin, John Rogers, TNT own these characters.

Description: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren't the only members of the two teams who've met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark.

By Paths Coincident

The shuddering of the Back Door of the Library Annex caused Jenkins to look up from his work. For a moment the door swung open on a desert landscape before the scene was blocked by the noisy and occasionally noisome Librarians in Training as they were herded to safety by their Guardian.

Jacob Stone was lovingly cradling an amphora filled with rolls of papyrus as if it were a child. Ezekiel Jones looked cheerfully amoral as was his wont. And Cassandra Cillian was bouncing with her usual enthusiasm.

"I can't believe we went to Egypt!" she crowed, waving around the scarf that had been covering her copper hair.

"I know!" Stone was scarcely less excited. "These are first century Coptic scrolls!"

"That I stole for you," Ezekiel pointed out, looking smug.

Colonel Eve Baird shut the door and wiped the unruly strands of her blond hair from her sweat plastered forehead.

"I take it that you were successfully able to prevent any further attempts to re-animate mummies?" Jenkins inquired, in the interests of assuring himself that his sacrifice of his peace was not in vain.

"Oh, yes," Baird groaned. "The dust has returned to the dust, as it were, and I'm pretty sure I'm wearing most of it. I need a shower and a good meal."

"Tell you what," Ezekiel said. "You go scrub off what's left of old Pharaoh Whatsit, and then we can all go out for dinner at this great little brew pub I've heard about. They say the food is the best in Portland."

"Are you paying?" Stone asked raising one eyebrow at the thief.

Ezekiel shrugged, "Sure. Why not? It's not like I really had to work for the money."

Jenkins rolled his eyes and began counting down the minutes before they left him in untroubled solitude again.

While he was constrained to allow them the run of the Annex, Jenkins had no desire to become mired down in the lives of mortals again. They were so short-sighted, so child-like, so . . . fragile. And damn it all to Tartarus, so easy to begin to care for. He had been alone for so long. Alone was best.

Every minute that the Librarians in Training and their Guardian spent in his domain, they spent getting under his skin, reminding him of what he had lost—of what he had yet to lose.

Cassandra Cillian, whose frail deeds danced so brightly as she faced the dying of her light, the one who, with a wild brilliance, could grasp the theory behind the magics he researched. She had become a fixture in his laboratory before he'd had the self-possession to object. It had been so very long since he had been able to share his passionate curiosity with another soul. But the sand in her hourglass was already running out.

Eve Baird, fierce protector, always the most likely to be lost due to the nature of her job, already a survivor of her own death in combat. Few humans received more than one chance. It was not safe to care about any of them, even such a valiant and splendid warrior as this one.

Jacob Stone, equally a scholar and artificer, for whom the Library was so much his native heath that he seldom spent any free time away from it, who loved books and the knowledge they contained with the pure, clear devotion of an acolyte to the divine. Stone was a source of constant astonishment and delight, the subtlety of his thoughts so unexpected in one so practical. Of all of them, he fit most seamlessly into the routine of the Annex, as if the building had absorbed him, and he was becoming the repository of all its secrets. With a feeling close to despair, Jenkins realized he could no longer imagine the Annex without Stone perched aloft with a manuscript, thumping down the stairs with a tome open in hand, sharing his discoveries as though offering his listeners the most precious treasures in the world.

Even Ezekiel Jones, with his irresponsible, incorrigible, hedonistic quest to acquire anything that he fancied, was becoming less distasteful. His wizardry with technology was a pleasure to behold. And occasionally, the boy seemed to display an actual human feeling, as though he was beginning to care about his team members as more than just skilled backup for his escapades.

Jenkins admitted, only to himself, that he was always relieved when a dangerous mission drew to a close with all four of his charges restored to the Annex in one piece. He dreaded the inevitable day when that would not be the case.

Catching himself, once again, treading on dangerous emotional ground, Jenkins roused up his irritation by mentally enumerating the ways in which his younger colleagues irritated him beyond belief. Anger was preferable to whatever these rusty and disused feelings were. The sooner these interlopers were out of his Annex, the sooner he could regain his equilibrium.

It took longer than he had hoped before they were ready to depart.

Cassandra bounded off to check on several experiments she had in progress in the laboratory.

Stone, who had to get his precious manuscripts into the humidifier, wandered off muttering something about love being the enemy of haste. He tossed a glare over his shoulder at the irrepressible Ezekiel who was making cracks about "Moisturize me!"

Jenkins shook his head in bafflement. Technically these children spoke English, but half the time he had no idea what they were saying.

With no one left to annoy, Ezekiel gallantly acknowledged Baird's precedence with regards to showering. Since he had scarcely a hair mussed, and she looked like she had been dragged behind a camel for a hectare of desert, this was only fair. However, just in case his lapse into politeness might rewrite any portion of his obnoxious code, he stole her chair at Flynn's desk and kicked back to play with something arcane on his phone.

When Baird emerged, damp and scrubbed and wearing something pastel if otherwise free of feminine frippery, the remainder of the team descended in sequence on Jenkin's shower. Thanks to Cassandra's science and Stone's knowledge of plumbing and one obscure magical artifact retrieved from the heart of a South Pacific volcano (and hadn't they all nearly died for that one), the Annex possessed an inexhaustible supply of hot water.

Jenkins protested this delay, but they claimed to be too exhausted to go home to bathe and change. Since they all had clothing stashed in the Annex for emergencies, he was left with no other efficacious method for ejecting them.

Finally, the lot of them were sanitized, clad in whatever garments they deemed fashionable, and ready to leave Jenkins to his own devices, although they did invite him to accompany them. Stone was satisfied that the papyrus was rehydrating nicely and would be fit to unroll the next day. Cassandra had recorded all her observations on her experiments. Ezekiel had accomplished nothing at all as far as Jenkins could tell. And Baird had made the unilateral decision that she wasn't appearing in another restroom stall if she didn't have to, so they would be utilizing Stone's crew cab pickup to drive there like civilized human beings.

Jenkins heaved a sigh of bittersweet relief as the young people disappeared into the entry tunnel with far more racket and energy than any person had a right to possess after a full day of saving the world.

Peace at last.

TBC


	2. Chapter 2

Title: By Paths Coincident 2/?

Author: Honorat

Rating: T

Characters: Jenkins, Eve Baird, Jacob Stone, Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, Parker, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Others TBA as needed.

Pairing: Parker/Hardison

Disclaimer: Dean Devlin, John Rogers, TNT own these characters.

Description: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren't the only members of the two teams who've met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark.

* * *

><p>The air duct above the kitchen counter rattled ominously, as though some large creature was scrabbling against the metal.<p>

"Parker!" Eliot yelled without looking up from the peppers he was chopping. "Get out of there! Our customers already think we have rats."

With a screech and a clatter, the grate covering the vent landed on the countertop. A rumpled blond head with wide, slightly manic eyes appeared in the opening—the Head of Leverage International, at times the Nemesis for all corporate evil-doers, at other times, like the present, a force of complete domestic catastrophe.

Eliot glared at her with all the ferocity that could turn to water the knees of hardened criminals, but Parker had always been immune to his threats.

Slithering head-first out of the vent, she hit the countertop with her hands and arched over into a backflip that set her on her feet within half an inch of Eliot.

Eliot refused to acknowledge her abrupt presence within his personal space, although anyone else but Parker would have found themselves flying through the kitchen door head first with no consideration as to whether that door was open. He returned assiduously to the peppers.

Parker, however, was on a mission and would brook no cold shoulders. "Eliot," she hissed. "Are you really Eliot?"

Eliot swivelled to look at her, which brought them nose to nose. "Of course I'm . . . who else would I be? Parker, if you don't . . ."

"Then why is there someone in the Brew Pub wearing your face?" Parker jabbed a finger at his nose causing him to take a step back to avoid losing an eye.

Eliot opened his mouth, decided there was no possible comment he could make to such a ridiculous statement, and closed it again. Scowling, he folded his arms

Parker circled him, peering closely into his face, and then leaned forward to sniff his neck.

"Stop it, Parker!" Eliot growled. "I don't have time for crazy."

He attempted to return to his interrupted food prep, but Parker was not to be dissuaded. She poked his arm, and he swatted her with a spatula.

"Go away. I'm busy."

"You feel real." Parker frowned at him suspiciously; then she reached out and tugged at a lock of his hair.

"Ow!" Eliot jumped away from her rubbing his abused scalp. "What is wrong with you?"

"I'm pretty sure it's you," Parker decided, looming up behind him and sniffing again. "But maybe I should check out the other you."

"What are you talking about?"

"The person with your face," Parker frowned at him as though he was disappointing her with his density. "He's here with a super hot redheaded girl, so maybe he really is you. And a thief. And a woman who acts like you."

"Parker," Eliot shook his head in exasperation and pinched the bridge of his nose, hard, as if that would drive away his incipient brain sprain, "I'm right here! In the kitchen! Talking to you. When I have other things I need to be doing."

"I got their phones." Parker hopped up on a high stool and spread her loot on the counter top that she'd already made unsanitary with her acrobatics.

"You can't . . ." Eliot balled his fists, clenched his teeth, closed his eyes, and prayed for patience even though he hadn't prayed in decades. "You can't rob our customers!"

Parker snorted. "Not all our customers, silly!" She eyed her acquisitions with enthusiasm. "Just the ones that come in with fake you."

"Hey, babe!" Hardison breezed into the room with his arms full of packages and landed a kiss on the nearest part of Parker he could reach which happened to be her ear. He nodded to the other occupant of the room. "Eliot."

Eliot did not commonly turn to Hardison for rescue, but this situation was an exception. He pointed an accusatory finger at the blonde thief. "Tell Parker she's not allowed to burgle our customers."

"Of course, she's not going to burgle our . . . Parker what have you been doing?"

"Somebody made a copy of Eliot," said Parker. "I'm spying. I want to know why."

"A copy of . . .? Damn, girl. You ain't makin' no sense whatsoever." Hardison shook his head as though to clear his ears.

"You see?" Eliot glared at her.

Parker scooped up the phones, slid off the stool, and held them out to Hardison.

"Mama, I can't, I got my hands full." Hardison scanned the room and unerringly bee-lined for the last remaining clean counter.

Eliot's outrage amped up. "What are you bringing in here? Is that some more of your useless kitchen gadgets? Don't you . . . Dammit, Hardison!"

He was going to have to scrub the entire kitchen. Honestly, with those two around, he might as well stop pretending on cons that he was a janitor and just admit it was the truth.

"Luddite," Hardison said, unruffled, taking the phones from Parker. "You just don't understand the future."

His agile fingers flicked on the devices and bared their little electronic souls. "Cassandra Cillian, hmmm. Looks just your type, Eliot. Eve Baird, has pictures of Minoan art on her phone. Seriously? Fergus McPhail—Okay, that's an alias. Jacob Stone. Whoa!" He held up the last phone so that he could compare the photo to Eliot's face. "Now that is just creepy. You got some kinda twin you not telling us about, huh?"

Of course, as soon as he heard the name, Eliot knew. "My cousin," he said shortly. "Our mommas were twins and our daddies were cousins." He shrugged at their stares of incredulity. "Tiny town in Oklahoma. People didn't move around much. We were born about 7 months apart. Gave our teachers hell."

"Why didn't you know this?" Parker asked Hardison, as though assuming that he spied on all of them.

Which apparently he did.

"Because I don' go lookin' for y'all's faces unless we're not together," Hardison said. "I just figure anyone looks like Eliot is Eliot, and all that stuff about Pakistan—well a man has a right to his secrets."

From anyone but Hardison, it seemed. Eliot rolled his eyes.

"So, I guess Pakistan was real?" Hardison asked.

"Yeah," Eliot sighed. "It was real."

"I also stole this," Parker pulled a semi-automatic pistol out of the pocket of her hoodie and waved it around illustratively.

"Whoa! Gun!" Hardison levitated away from her. "Uh uh! No way! Get that thing out of here! Parker, give it to Eliot! Eliot! Get the gun!"

Giving Hardison an incredulous look, Eliot held out his hand. "Let me see that."

Parker wrinkled her nose at Hardison, but she handed over the weapon willingly enough.

Hardison, edged back into range. "Woman, do not do that to me. Give me a heart attack."

Parker and Eliot exchanged smirks.

"Y'all are just insensitive," Hardison complained under his breath.

As he rotated the pistol in his hands, ejecting the magazine and unchambering the round, Eliot's good humor evaporated. "You stole this weapon from an officer, Parker?"

Parker looked intrigued. "I did? How can you tell?"

"It's probably a very distinctive something," Hardison offered from a distance.

"Well, it's a Glock 17 G4, and a lot of people carry 'em." Eliot glared at Hardison. "Not distinctive. But look at this one." He held out the gun towards Parker and she bent over in curiosity. "The grip is nearly worn smooth. Means she's had this for a long time and used it a lot. Not a weekender at the firing range. And here, she's put an aftermarket trigger on this. Reduces the 17's slightly mushy trigger pull."

"I didn't tell you I stole it from the woman who acts like you," Parker said.

Eliot frowned. "Again, look at the wear. The person who uses this has a slim, smaller hand—likely a woman." He turned the pistol over. "See this mark in the polymer? That's made by a blade with a really superior edge. This weapon's seen combat. A lot of agencies equip their personnel with these. . . . Wait a minute, what do you mean 'acts like me'?"

"You know, walks in a door and moves everyone to the side of the frame all protecty-like, eyes everyone in the room like she thinks they might be assassins, then picks the only seat in the room where you can see everything but there's nothing behind you." Parker pantomimed exaggerated paranoia.

"Well that's just peachy," Hardison groused. "As if law enforcement isn't already on our asses too much of the time."

He'd spent the gun detective lesson pulling up the Brew Pub's surveillance. "Uh oh." He pointed to the kitchen monitor. "You're about to get blown."

In the grainy picture, Eliot could see one of the wait staff approaching the table where the Leverage team usually met clients. Four people sat around it. Two women and two men. Of course, the staff were probably labouring under the delusion that Jacob was him. The resemblance was still uncanny.

Much as he didn't want to go out there, he knew he had better. Family was—complicated. However, the confusion was only going to increase exponentially if Jacob didn't know Eliot was here. And if the Brew Pub staff didn't realize that Jacob wasn't their chef with a haircut.

And something about Jacob's companions was bothering him.

"Hardison, get me intel on the gun owner."

"Will this help?" Parker pulled out a passport from God only knew where.

Hardison took the document, flipped open the page with the identity information, and yelped, "Parker, you stole the phone, gun, and passport of Colonel Eve Baird, NATO Counter-terrorism! Are you crazy?!"

"You know the answer to that question!" Eliot snapped. "Give me that! What's a counter-terrorism agent doing in a restaurant in Portland . . ."

He failed to finish his sentence when he saw the picture.

Eliot Spencer did not have a perfect memory for faces, but there were certain people whose faces he had tried and failed to forget. The woman looking up at him from the small photograph wore one of those faces.

Vaguely he was aware that Hardison was still rapidly researching, complaining about the illogic of a colonel being reassigned on detached duty to something called the Metropolitan Library.

Eliot threw the passport back at Parker, not surprised that she caught it out of the air, and growled. "Give those people back their stuff."

He ignored her pout that always accompanied a command to return her spoils.

He had to go out there and meet his cousin. He had to go out there and meet Colonel Eve Baird.

This was not going to go well.

"Are you okay, man?" Hardison, as always, was the one to notice.

Eliot strode out of the room without answering. Behind his back he heard Hardison tell Parker, "We need to follow him. That's the same way he looked when Moreau captured that General friend of his in San Lorenzo—like he knew he just got somebody killed."

TBC


	3. Chapter 3

Title: By Paths Coincident 3/?

Author: Honorat

Rating: T

Characters: Jenkins, Eve Baird, Jacob Stone, Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, Parker, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Others TBA as needed.

Pairing: Parker/Hardison

Disclaimer: Dean Devlin, John Rogers, TNT own these characters.

Description: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren't the only members of the two teams who've met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark.

* * *

><p>It was raining as Eve herded her librarian trainees out to Stone's pickup. Cassandra was the only one prepared for the weather in a bright yellow raincoat with matching boots and umbrella. Eve was too tired to care how wet she got.<p>

Since it was his truck, Stone would drive while Ezekiel, as the one who knew where they were going, would ride up front as navigator. That left the back seat for her and Cassandra.

Ever and unfailingly courteous, Stone handed Cassandra up the high step into his truck, held her umbrella over the doorway so she wouldn't get wet, then folded it and gave it to her. Eve knew if she hung around her side of the vehicle, he'd show up and help her in as well. She never gave him that opportunity unless she was injured too badly to drag her own self where she wanted to go, so she hopped in the truck and settled herself next to Cassandra.

Cassandra had a funny look on her face, as if she weren't sure how to feel about the matter.

They had to find parking several blocks from the Brew Pub and splash through the rain glittering in the street lights to get there. Ezekiel inserted himself under half of Cassandra's umbrella while Eve and Jacob simply endured the wet. Arriving at their destination, the team let Stone take point out of habit. Of all of them, he interfaced with ordinary human beings the best. Ezekiel had no tact whatsoever, Eve was more used to giving orders, and Cassandra had less experience, so they were all glad to let their teammate lead the way with his warm smile and firm handshake.

Tonight, the Brew Pub was crowded, with several groups of people waiting for tables. Evidently it was a popular hangout for Portland locals. Stone approached the young woman recording reservations. Flashing her his most charming smile, he asked, "Can you tell me how long it'll be for a table for four to be available?"

Eve would admit—in the privacy of her own head only, ever—that Stone was looking particularly dashing tonight in his dark coat and scarf with rain-jeweled hair bringing out the blue of his eyes. But surely that did not account for the behaviour of the young person at the desk.

The girl's eyes opened wide, as though the request astonished her. Then she frowned, considering, seemed to reach a conclusion, and returned her own bright smile.

"Of course, sir. We have a table ready immediately," she said, all eager attentiveness. "Right this way. If your party would just follow me."

Stone glanced back at his team with bemused triumph, and Eve gave him a quizzical stare. Jones looked pleased but innocuous, and Cassandra eyed the young woman skeptically. Obviously, none of them had any idea how they had achieved this precedence over all the other waiting diners.

With her habitual caution, Eve scanned the room for any potential threats, noting all entrances and egresses, cataloguing traffic patterns and scrutinizing the patrons. She also kept an eye on Ezekiel in case his itch to increase his wealth should lead him astray. Being Ezekiel's guardian far too often involved guarding others from him.

He gave her an angelic grin that had her resolved to tip him upside down and shake out his pockets before they left this place.

Navigating a bit of confusion as several other patrons of the Brew Pub exited at the same time as the Librarian team entered, they were shown to a table that Eve would have described as perfect. While being set in a somewhat private corner, it yet afforded a clear view of the entire room.

The young woman who had led them to the table seemed a bit confused when Stone held Eve's chair for her instead of taking it himself (Eve scowled at him, but allowed him to seat her), then took the seat with his back to the rest of the room—like Stone had done something wrong or at least unexpected.

Almost . . . Eve frowned . . . almost as if he were already part of a play in which the rest of the team had no part, but he didn't know his lines or where he was supposed to stand.

She glared at the establishment with even more suspicion. They did not need magical shenanigans on their night out.

"Your waiter will be with you right away," the helpful employee said, eyeing Stone's back.

"Thank you," said Eve, drawing attention back to herself. "May we look at the menu?"

"Oh, yes, I'm sorry!" The flustered girl fumbled the folders she'd been clutching.

Cassandra smiled at her sympathetically. Ezekiel yawned. And Stone, of course, turned with his dazzling grin and said, "Let me help you with those, darlin'."

The poor child looked like she wasn't sure what to do, so Stone plucked the menus from her hands and dealt them out to his team.

"Th-th-thank you," she stammered turning a blotchy red. Then she fled. There was no other word to accurately describe her precipitate departure.

"Well, that was kind of odd," Cassandra said.

Stone smirked at her with those bright eyes that always made Eve convinced he was five years old and into mischief.

"Read your menu, Casanova!" she ordered.

"Casanova was also a librarian in the Count Waldstein's household," Stone said, opening the folder.

"Is there any piece of historical trivia that you do not have on the tip of your tongue?" Ezekiel asked.

Stone looked at him as though he was unbelievable and shook his head. Of course not. Eve sighed.

They had barely had a chance to glance at the Brew Pub's menus before another of its employees materialized at their table. Eve had never before patronized an establishment where the service was quite so . . . well, servile.

"Hello there," said the dark-haired girl, her white smile lighting up her face. "My name is Amy, and I'll be your waitress tonight. Can I get you something to drink?"

This one, since she was standing behind Stone, seemed immune to whatever it was about him that had the other woman so blitzed.

It had been a long day. Eve had fought a mummy. Even after her shower, she couldn't shake the sensation that there were still mummy molecules in her lungs. "Just bring me the best single malt whiskey you've got," she sighed.

"Look, Ezekiel!" Cassandra exclaimed, examining the beverage menu. "They have a drink just for you. 'Thief Juice: It's a mouth crime'!"

Amy snorted. "I think I should warn you—that item is something of an in-joke here at the Brew Pub. I'm pretty sure our chef came close to murdering my boss when he put it on the menu. It's the boss's personal brew, so it's probably made with lasers and possibly the blood of an alien. It's really quite dreadful."

"Even better!" Stone shot Ezekiel a cheerfully homicidal grin. "He'll definitely have that!"

"Yeah," Ezekiel decided. "I'm the adventurous sort. I'll give it a go."

The minute she heard Stone's voice, Amy froze. And when he turned to order a beer, her dusky skin turned a shade paler. She didn't stammer like the previous girl, but she backed up a step and apologized, "I'm sorry, sir. I didn't realize it was you." Her hand flew up to touch her hair.

The Librarians in Training exchanged puzzled glances. Stone appeared as baffled as the rest of them. Eve narrowed her eyes and wondered what fresh supernatural doohickey thingummy they were going to end up disarming instead of enjoying a peaceful meal.

"It's okay, Amy," said a voice Eve would have sworn was Stone's, except his mouth hadn't moved. "I'll take this table, tonight."

Eve had been so focused on the situation with their waitress, she hadn't noticed the three people approaching. A rookie mistake with the potential to be fatal.

Cassandra gave a little gasp and covered her mouth with both hands, her eyes going wide.

"Whoa!" Ezekiel exclaimed looking back and forth between the man sitting at their table and the new arrivals.

One of the three looked exactly like Jacob Stone.

It said something about the life she had been leading that Eve's first thoughts were that this was either a bizarre manifestation of some sort of magic—a shapeshifter or an illusion—or that this was actually Stone travelling from the past or the future. No, not from the past. Her mind immediately dismissed that theory. Nothing Stone was now could ever have once been the duplicate that stood before them. Her next thought was that she did not ever want to know what could turn a man like Stone into such a person as the man who wore his face.

Jacob Stone moved large and loose in the world, his features mobile, a keen enjoyment of everything sparkling off of him. For all of his strength and his exuberance in a fight, Stone was a gentle soul. There was a banked pain in his eyes, but it was the pain of a good man who cared too much, of a private man who dared too little. And life among the Librarians in Training had eased some of that. If he did not yet trust them entirely, he was infinitely trustworthy.

This man, this stranger with Stone's face—she'd seen men like him too many times before. He moved like a predator, still and controlled, with violence seething under his skin, his face giving away nothing, his swift gaze cataloguing threats. She saw him unerringly note each of the weapons she wore concealed. But it was his eyes that distinguished him the most from Stone. They were a soldier's eyes—eyes that had recorded too much horror. She'd seen that kind of unrelenting pain in the eyes of men and women in her command, when the memories of things they had witnessed, of things they had experienced, and perhaps most of all of things they had done approached the unbearable. She had seen eyes like that in her own mirror.

But what puzzled her was the recognition she saw in his face. Stone's double was looking at her as if he were seeing a ghost.

For a moment their gazes knotted together in a tangle of her confusion and his uncanny recognition. Then, with a professional reassertion of self-control, the stranger shifted his focus to their historian.

"Jake Stone," he said, holding out his hand. "Isn't that a kick in the teeth!"

Stone's face, as he stood to take the other's hand, was a mixture of astonishment and joy.

"Eliot! You're alive! Guys, you remember the cousins I used to bar fight with on Christmas Eve? This is the best one of them!" He pulled the other man into an enthusiastic, if somewhat one-sided, hug. However, after a moment of stiff bemusement, his cousin raised an arm to awkwardly return the gesture.

"You left home when you were 18," said the young dark-skinned man who accompanied Stone's cousin. "What were you doing in bars often enough to have a tradition?"

"Being a bad influence, eh Jake?"

Side by side, the resemblance between the two of them was remarkable. Stone's cousin might have been just a touch narrower in the face and was obviously in fighting trim, but Eve didn't think she could have distinguished between them, separately, other than by Stone's much shorter hair. No wonder they'd thrown the Brew Pub employees into such a dither.

"This," Stone gestured around at the restaurant. "This is what you're doing now?"

"In part," his cousin tipped his head in acknowledgement. "I try to keep Hardison here from serving anchovies with pineapple, and otherwise insure that he doesn't bankrupt the place with lousy food."

"Hey!" the young man, Hardison, looked indignant. "Just because you're a high and mighty chef doesn't mean my culinary inventions are from the Dark Side."

Ignoring his colleague, Stone's cousin asked, "So, what brings you to Portland?"

Eve knew Stone had not told his family what he was now doing for employment.

He'd shrugged, saying, "It's better they still think I'm working in the oil industry."

However, the situation might become a little awkward if he found himself living in the same city as his cousin without admitting at least some of what he was doing there. Considering the man still enduring Stone's arm around his shoulders, Eve decided that surely their secret scholar would feel able to admit his artistic connections to a man who dressed in a floral apron, who tossed shoulder length locks to reveal turquoise and silver beads braided in his hair, and who worked as a chef. For all that his body language shouted ex-military, Stone's cousin's camouflage bespoke a man distancing himself from that past.

After a brief hesitation, Stone seemed to come to a similar conclusion. "I'm . . . um . . . I'm employed with a . . . with a small historical foundation archiving their collection of rare books and art here in Portland."

"The Metropolitan Library, right?" spoke up the blonde girl who made up the other part of the trio. Both Hardison and Stone's cousin glared at her.

"That's . . . correct," said Stone slowly, "but how . . ."

"Oooh, rare art! Sophie likes art," the girl said with a smile that was somehow just a bit off.

With what was obviously the ease of long practice, Stone's cousin intervened. "I always knew you had it in you, class valedictorian! Now how about you introduce me to your colleagues? Friends?"

His smile at them all held some of Stone's familiar charm with much less warmth. Eve got the impression that he was asking the question like something disagreeable that nevertheless must be done.

"Oh! Of course! Pardon my manners." Stone gestured to Cassandra first. "This is Cassandra Cillian. She's the scientific part of the team."

"Pleasure to make your acquaintance, ma'am," said Stone's double, his smile now as warm as his cousin's. He took the hand Cassandra offered, but instead of shaking it, he bowed a kiss over it. "Portland is certainly a more beautiful city tonight than it has ever been before."

Seriously? Two of them? Eve resisted the urge to roll her eyes.

Cassandra did not look displeased with the compliment. "Portland is certainly a more interesting city tonight," she said.

Stone looked unsure whether to be happy or worried that his cousin was getting along so well with her. "Cassie, this is Eliot Spencer, the lost sheep of the family."

At the mention of his full name, the minute relaxation Stone's cousin had undergone reversed to high alert tension. Gone was any pretence that this meeting was simply a happy coincidence of relatives getting back in touch.

Eve's reflexes had her on her feet, battle-ready, her veins running 99 proof adrenaline, all her attention on the man who no longer looked like merely a restaurant chef. Her hand instinctively hovered over the place her gun was concealed, and with choking horror she realized it was missing.

Their eyes locked like the sights of weapons.

He had been the first to recognize her, because she had never before seen his face. However, that name—Eliot Spencer—was one Colonel Eve Baird, NATO Counter-terrorism, knew far too well.

Eliot Spencer, enforcer for Damien Moreau, who bankrolled terrorists and moved nuclear materials for Iran, whom no law enforcement agency could touch-if she was his ghost, he was her murderer.

TBC


	4. Chapter 4

Title: By Paths Coincident 4/?

Author: Honorat

Rating: T

Characters: Jenkins, Eve Baird, Jacob Stone, Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, Parker, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Damien Moreau, Chapman, Others TBA as needed.

Pairing: Parker/Hardison, Cassandra/Jake, Cassandra/Eliot

Disclaimer: Dean Devlin, John Rogers, TNT own these characters.

Description: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren't the only members of the two teams who've met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark.

* * *

><p>Eve was calculating possible outcomes. How was this situation likely to play out? There was no doubt that the four of them were outmatched, but Stone, as Spencer's cousin, was likely safe, and he would protect Cassandra. Ezekiel, as always, would escape. That left her with three opponents.<p>

She spared a fragment of her attention to evaluate the two unknown factors in her equation—the young man and woman who accompanied Spencer.

Here, her analysis hit a snag. If they were his backup, why weren't they focused on the perceived threat? The two of them had, instead, closed ranks, moving near to Spencer, the young woman hovering at his back, the young man actually laying a supportive hand on his shoulder—as though they were a comfort rather than a defense. Their eyes were on him, not her.

And Spencer himself, while his tension was palpable, made no move that she could construe as aggressive. His body language was almost deliberately non-threatening—as though he was projecting reassurance.

She did not trust that reassurance, but perhaps she might hope that some combination of factors, whether the presence of his cousin or the other customers, might be constraining him from any extreme action.

As an experiment, testing that theory, she relaxed her stance slightly. The relief in Spencer's eyes when she did stunned her.

Ezekiel was the first to break the silence. "So, I'm taking it you two have met before?"

"Yes—and no," Spencer said finally, his voice sounding tired. "We've never been introduced."

Stone, who had been looking thoroughly disturbed by the turn of events, rallied and resumed his social duty. "Eliot, this is Eve Baird. She's security for the archive."

Spencer did not offer his hand, nor did Eve offer hers. She was grateful. She did not think she could have let him touch her.

The last time Eliot Spencer had laid a hand on her, she had spent two and a half weeks in a coma, two years in rehab, and a third year in therapy. The last time she had met him with a team, people she considered closer than family with whom she'd been through the hell of combat and for whose lives she was responsible, she had come home with nothing but a handful of dog tags.

* * *

><p><em>11 Years Earlier<em>

_NATO Headquarters, Brussels, Belgium_

Captain Eve Baird stood at attention as General Deschamps finished arranging the papers on his desk with mathematical precision. Folding his hands carefully on top of a file folder, he looked up at her.

"At ease, Captain," he said. "Thank you for responding to my request so promptly. Please, be seated."

Eve had not thought the message she had received had sounded like a request, but she simply nodded and complied. "Yes, sir."

"I am sending your team to Spain," the General said without further preamble. "We have a situation at the Port of Algeciras Bay. One of the companies financed by Damien Moreau will be shipping nuclear materials through APM Terminals at Juan Carlos I Dock within the week. Your mission will be to insure that cargo does not fall into the hands of Moreau's customers, likely the Iranians, and to extract our informant who is seeking asylum and protection from Moreau's retaliation."

At the mention of Damien Moreau's name, Eve felt her pulse pick up and her breath grow short. Everyone knew that no one touched Moreau. His reputation for clean, untraceable operations was nearly mythical. There were never more than rumours about Moreau's activities, and one could not arrest a rumour. Equally formidable was his reputation for swift, effective, and deadly reprisal when any of his empire was threatened.

"Because of the Port's exceptional geostrategic location and its role as the main southern European gateway for products coming from emerging markets in North Africa, we must intercept the merchandise before the transaction is complete," the General continued, handing her the folder. "If those materials transfer out of the hands of the original carrier, we have little chance of discovering their destination before they disappear into the trans-European transport network. You will need to strike at the most vulnerable moment."

The use of the word "vulnerable" in connection with anything related to Moreau was, as far as Eve was concerned, inappropriate in the extreme, but she refrained from commenting.

"Moreau rules his empire with an iron hand. No one betrays him. He makes certain the cost is inestimably too high. The fact that we have an informant who swears he can link this operation directly to Moreau is unprecedented, so we must move quickly."

Eve nodded. "I understand, sir."

"This is our first real chance to have some effect against Moreau's organization," Deschamps said, and there was an eagerness underlying his dispassionate words. "He is not expecting any trouble with this shipment. Our intelligence places him with his personal security forces in Panama for the next two weeks. He will have, at most, only a couple of his own guards with the merchandise. The rest of the deal will be handled by the middlemen who are working with us for a change."

He tapped a key on his laptop, and a projected map of the Strait of Gibralter appeared on the wall screen to the side of his desk. He zoomed in to the Spanish shore and then enlarged the satellite photo of the Port of Algeciras Bay until he was focused on the Juan Carlos I Dock.

"You can see that this operation will be complicated by the fact that the shipping company does not know in advance at which slip their ship will berth, nor where they will be instructed to deliver the merchandise. Moreau prefers to keep all parties involved in his transactions unaware of the details until the last possible moment to eliminate just the sort of interference we are attempting. The APM Terminals are spread out along 2 kilometres of quay line, and their storage facilities cover 67 hectares of logistic surface, so you must be prepared to mobilize rapidly the minute we receive confirmation of the location of the transfer."

"Will we have any support from the Port authorities?" Eve asked, frowning at the map and already selecting the optimal point from which to launch her mission.

"No. We have chosen to keep this operation undercover because we have no way of knowing how embedded in the control of the Port, Moreau is. We cannot risk him discovering our intentions."

"Permission to speak frankly, sir?" Eve asked, aware that her nerves were jangling in ways that she had learned to pay attention to.

General Deschamps tipped his head slightly. "Permission granted."

"The operation sounds well-planned, but still—Damien Moreau? He's never been caught out yet. Are you sure the intel is good?"

"I understand and commend your caution, Captain Baird. I can assure you we have done all in our power to cross-check our informant's information. We're as certain as we can be under these circumstances. But you are right that Damien Moreau is always a dangerous opponent. That's why we're sending our best team."

* * *

><p>NATO's best team, Eve thought with fond exasperation as they came boiling into the room for the briefing she'd scheduled. Selected from the most valuable operatives in the NATO forces of eight countries, they reminded her of nothing so much as a tumble of puppies.<p>

Little Teresinha of Portugal, who looked like she could be knocked down with a dandelion, had their Viking giant Torbjørn from Norway in a headlock, because, she explained, he was deserving of much choking for taking the last crepe at lunch.

The Terrible Twosome, representing the UK, were carrying on one of their political arguments that always took place with unbelievable amounts of profanity at the tops of their lungs. As usual they were finishing each other's sentences until they had switched sides. While not actually related, they looked as if they could be with their nearly identical mops of curly dark hair, white-toothed grins, and deceptively guileless Bambi eyes. Eve would have had to look up their actual names on her computer because they had been Two More and Two Less for as long as she'd known them.

Poptart was inflicting the latest in a series of hundreds of thousands of photographs of his wife and small son back in Canada upon the hapless Fortinsky who'd taken to retaliating with pictures of his boyfriend and parrot at home in Poland.

Derya of Turkey and Joscin of France were attempting to teach each other to Tango, an exercise in futility, since neither of them knew more than what they had seen on a single episode of badly sub-titled "Dancing with the Stars".

Lieutenant Brader, of Germany, her second in command, was the only one behaving with any restraint. As usual, he was glaring at the lot of them as though the sheer force of his will could reform them.

Looking at them now, she wondered if anyone would believe they had served together with distinction in most of the heaviest NATO operations throughout Europe and the Middle East.

Calling the meeting to order, however, she had the satisfaction of seeing them slip into their truly professional modes. When they were all seated, she called up General Deschamps' graphics on the screen and presented the mission he had given to them.

Their reactions shouldn't have surprised her.

Poptart let out a cheer. "It's about time somebody let us have a crack at Moreau!"

Derya's smile was wolfish as she agreed. "Moreau is a blot on the face of the planet, and we are the moist towlettes."

"When do we start?" the Terrible Twosome asked in unison.

Eve grinned at their enthusiasm. "Transport leaves at 0600 tomorrow morning. Be there with your kit packed or you're walking. Bring your four leaf clover, Poptart. We're going to Spain."

"Yes, sir!" they exclaimed.

Their precipitate exit from the room resulted in a bottle-neck and a scuffle. Eve just rolled her eyes.

There had been no way she or her superiors could have known that one of Moreau's men was more than a match for her entire team. Damian Moreau had not needed his army, because he'd had Eliot Spencer.

* * *

><p><em>Villa El Otro Lado, Portabelo, Panama<em>

Eliot Spencer, wearing a loud floral hat and clashing swim trunks, sauntered out to the pavilion by the pool near his private villa, ice-cold beer in one hand, towel over his shoulder in the other, and reflected that this job was infinitely superior to any other killer-for-hire gig he'd ever signed on for, especially the US military.

The scars decorating his bare arms and chest were evidence that he'd bled for all the men and organizations that had temporarily contracted for his services, but Damien Moreau was certainly the one who provided the best compensation.

His bare feet were still undecided whether to appreciate the sun-warmed tile or object to the near-burning sensation. Objection won, and his progress to the shade of the pavilion was completed in the prancing dance of a man trying to walk on air.

Throwing himself onto a lounge chair, he mock-glared at the man laughing at his undignified arrival.

"I'll have to give you a 9.5 for that performance," said Damien Moreau, stretching his tall form in the other chair.

"Only a 9.5?" Eliot scowled, taking a swig of his beer. "I deserve at least a 10. That last move was inspired, man. Inspired."

Damien raised a glass decorated with fruit and a ridiculous paper umbrella. "I like a man who knows what he's worth."

The other occupants of the pavilion, male and female, feeling that permission had been granted, joined carefully in the laughter of the two men.

Eliot smirked up at Chapman, who, like the other on-duty security, was sweating away uncomfortably in a dark suit and glasses, and likely fuming that he would never dare to appear in Moreau's presence in such a state of disrespectful undress.

Eliot had nothing to prove to any of them and didn't give a damn how he looked.

After all, the only reason his feet were sensitive to the heat was that the man whom Damien had last sent him to take down had possessed a medieval taste for the bastinado. Eliot Spencer had single-handedly escaped captivity and burned that bastard and everything he had ever touched to the ground before returning in bloody, limping triumph with his mission accomplished in less time than he had allowed. Such a man had no need to worry that any of the lesser minions who hovered about Moreau would question his competence no matter what he chose to do.

As for Damien, he seemed to appreciate working with someone who wasn't fawningly obsequious or abjectly terrified of him.

The two of them relaxed, sipping their respective drinks in companionable silence, listening to the inane chatter of the bikini-clad young women who seemed to be a permanent feature of Damien's retinue and to the buzzing vibration of hummingbird wings in the heliconias overhanging the pavilion.

Chapman had used to enjoy trying to nail the little flying gemstones with pebbles for his own amusement until Eliot had pinned him to the ground and threatened to rip his arm off and beat him to death with it if he didn't leave them alone—which wasn't an idle threat, as Chapman well knew.

"I like them" was Eliot's only explanation. "Better than I like you."

Eliot set his beer down beside his chair, leaned back, and tilted his hat over his eyes. He was still not quite recuperated from that last mission, and sleep seemed to beckon.

However, Damien's voice interrupted his drift to dreamland.

"Gentlemen, ladies, if you would give us a moment alone, Spencer and I have business to discuss."

Eliot tipped up his hat and squinted at Damien. Something was up.

The glare Chapmen sent him as he departed the pavilion was equal parts rage and jealousy, a heady brew that Eliot was quite willing to enjoy. He smirked cheerfully at his rival and gave a little wave. If Chapman wasn't careful he was going to blow a blood vessel.

Once they were alone, Damien wasted no time. While he remained reclined on the lounge chair, idly twirling his drink between long fingers, his voice became the sharpened steel that his enemies had cause to dread.

"I have a little job for you, at the Port of Algeciras Bay. My informants inside NATO tell me that they are sending a team to intercept my next shipment to the Iranians. You will eliminate this team for me."

Eliot tipped his head. Of course. "Untraceable or loud and messy?" he asked, taking a casual sip of his beer. It was getting too warm.

"They are a message." Damien's smile was all shark and no merriment. "NATO may interfere with terrorist scum with my good will. They may not, however, interfere with me."

Eliot raised his bottle in a toast. "Messy it is."

He drained the last of the beverage, set it down on the table next to his chair, and got to his feet with none of the languid relaxation of the vacationer and with all of the quiescent power of a cannon that had just been loaded and primed.

Damien Moreau's smile now was that of a man confident that he had superior firepower and that his enemies' destruction was assured.

"One more thing, Spencer," Moreau said. "The quisling transport company agent who seeks to double cross me? Eliminate him and anyone connected to him as we usually do."

"It's done," Eliot said.

"You'll find the photographs, maps, and all other intelligence encrypted on your computer in your villa. Leave tonight, but do not fly out of Panama. I leave it up to you whether you choose Costa Rica or Colombia. Fly from there to Morocco where I will have a private helicopter at your disposal which will take you across the Strait of Gibralter. Once you have taken care of business, return the helicopter to Morocco, and make your way here. Do not leave any record of your departures or arrivals either in Panama or in Spain. I do not choose that anyone else here knows that you are gone."

"Then my absence might raise awkward questions," Eliot pointed out.

"Ah," said Damien. "There will be no awkward questions because you will be spending the next three days in the privacy of your villa making passionate love to a beautiful woman."

Eliot laughed. "Does this woman have a name?"

"She does, in fact." Damien looked towards the pool where a variety of ladies were clustered, in and out of the water. "Siobhan!" he called.

All of Damien's women were extremely attractive, but the young woman, with the waist-length curls as red and gold as the heliconias, who separated from the group and came their direction certainly proved that Damien knew Eliot too well.

"Do you trust her?" Eliot asked, refusing to be distracted by the approaching vision of feminine pulchritude.

"Siobhan has proved trustworthy in the past. She only knows that she is to spend the next three days in your villa with the blinds drawn. She is to order food for two from Room Service. And she is to emerge after you return with tales of your prowess as a lover," Damien reassured him. "For these onerous tasks, she will receive a truly shocking amount of money. Double if no rumor of your absence surfaces within the space of a year's time."

"For buying a woman off to tell lies about me," Eliot scowled at Damian, "you'd better be prepared to pay me an even more shocking amount of money."

"You have a few hours before sunset," Damien smirked at him. "Make it the truth."

"Has anyone ever told you you're an evil man?" Eliot said, rolling his eyes.

"Not to my face, no," Damien said thoughtfully. "You are a first for many things, Eliot Spencer."

The lovely Siobhan joined them in the pavilion in time to hear Moreau's last words. She smiled flirtatiously at the two men.

"Aren't you going to introduce us, Damien?"

Eliot noted that her eyes were grey, and her skin was patterned with light gold freckles. He liked that she was barefoot instead of affecting high heels and that her bikini was patterned with cartoon dinosaurs. Above and beyond the way she filled it out, the whimsy appealed to him.

"Eliot, meet Siobhan Byrne. Siobhan, Eliot Spencer."

"A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Spencer," Siobhan held out her hand, her eyes travelling approvingly over him, and her lips curving in a pleased smile.

"The pleasure is most certainly mine, Ms. Byrne," he said taking her hand and raising it to his lips. "And it's Eliot, please."

"Then you must call me Siobhan," she said.

"Run along, you two," Damien said. "And make it convincing."

"I'll see you when I return," Eliot nodded to Damien.

"I'll look forward to it," Damien said.

Eliot slipped his arm around the lady's waist, and she giggled and stroked her fingers through his close-cropped hair. A professional performance all around. They sauntered off towards Eliot's villa, pausing on the veranda, for the benefit of the audience by the pool, to exchange a stage-worthy kiss that became a great deal more heated than Eliot had intended.

* * *

><p>Later that night, as Eliot donned the dark camouflage that would allow him to move through the jungle surrounding Moreau's retreat as if he were only another shadow, Siobhan propped herself up in his bed, clad only in her glorious hair.<p>

"When Damien sends a man away in secret like this, I know people will die."

Her pensive voice caused him to pause a moment in his preparations, but Eliot did not intend to discuss his mission with her.

His silence, however, merely confirmed her conclusion.

"Then I will wait here and pray that it is not you," she said. "And when you return, I will stay a fourth day for which Damien will not be paying me, and nothing I say will be a lie."

She did indeed have those charming golden freckles absolutely everywhere, Eliot reflected. And he wanted nothing more than to play connect the dots with his tongue. He smiled at her and leaned over, tipping her chin up, to give her a tender, slow kiss good bye.

"Then I will most definitely come back alive, sweetheart," he promised.

* * *

><p>TBC<p> 


	5. Chapter 5

Title: By Paths Coincident 5/?

Author: Honorat

Rating: T

Characters: Jenkins, Eve Baird, Jacob Stone, Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, Parker, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Damien Moreau, Chapman, Others TBA as needed.

Pairing: Parker/Hardison, Cassandra/Jake, Cassandra/Eliot, just a touch of Eliot/OC

Disclaimer: Dean Devlin, John Rogers, TNT own these characters.

Description: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren't the only members of the two teams who've met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark.

Warning: Graphic Depictions of Violence—this chapter is a specific description of what Eve described generally in the last chapter. Steer clear if you don't want to watch beloved characters do and experience bad things.

* * *

><p>By Paths Coincident<p>

_11 Years Ago_

_Port of Algeciras Bay, Strait of Gibralter, Spain _

Captain Eve Baird parked the rented BMW SUV by the base of one of the post Panamax ship-to-shore cranes that the Port of Algeciras Bay boasted. In her side mirror, she could see headlights telling her that Fortinsky was pulling up behind with the other half of the team. NATO had no airbases in Spain, so they'd flown commercial from Brussels into Aeropuerto de Jerez late that night, acquired the vehicles, and driven the hour and a half to the Port. The night was still moonless and dark, but the Port lights cast everything into a contrast of glaring white and black shadow.

So far their cover story was holding. As representatives of Langdonne Enterprises, Inc. they were to meet an agent to negotiate the purchase of cargo loaded on the same ship as their target. The burner phone, resting in her pocket, contained a single text with cryptic numbers that translated to a time and berth at which the off-loading would occur. Forged bill of lading papers, which would allow them to depart with Moreau's merchandise, crackled in her other pocket.

They had time to get into position before the ship would dock.

Her team members were professionally subdued in their behavior, but Joscin and Derya were staging a whispered debate about whether, when the mission was complete, they could wrangle a day's leave to run down to Costa del Sol for some R and R.

In the shadow of the great crane, they stripped out of their bulky civvy camouflage, into the leaner silhouettes of their combat gear—Teresinha joked that it was the fastest-working diet she'd tried. Not that Interceptor Body Armor was so very figure-flattering.

Lieutenant Brader was unpacking their weapons from the suitcases, muttering under his breath about Poptart's Mickey Mouse boxers.

"What can I say?" Poptart shrugged as he accepted his M-16 and ammunition from the Lieutenant. "Father's Day present. My strength is as the strength of twenty because my shorts are licensed by Disney."

"Twenty mice!" Fortinsky teased.

"Hey!" Poptart sniffed loftily. "That mouse rules half the known world." He checked his pockets for his lucky four-leafed clover and his photographs of his wife and son. "All set."

"All right, you chuckleheads." Eve tried to sound like she wasn't laughing. "Get your helmets on, and let's move out."

"Yes, sir, She Who Must Be Obeyed," the Terrible Twosome chorused, donning their helmets.

As her team split up into their designated groups and melted into the shadows where they would assume their agreed-upon positions, Eve did not feel any chill of premonition. Fate sent her no sign that she would never see her whole team alive again.

* * *

><p>Perched high on the beam of the post Panamax crane, Eliot Spencer watched through his infra-red scope as the NATO team separated, crept from shadow to shadow until they had reached their positions, and established their hiding places. Even from this short observation, he was enumerating weaknesses, developing strategies for dealing with each of the individuals in the team. There was a phrase for this sort of operation, he decided. It was called shooting fish in a barrel.<p>

In the east, the night was turning imperceptibly into pre-dawn grey, and he could see the dark blot of the ship as it approached this side of the Strait.

First he would deal with the traitor. Then he would go collect his prey from the places they had so conveniently stashed themselves. He would start with the group farthest from their commanding officer. NATO didn't put officers in charge of teams like this because their granddaddies went to private school with the right brass. Whoever she was, she would be a formidable opponent. If he took her on first, he ran the risk of being injured and compromised in his ability to go after the others. This way, they might bust each other into pieces, but all that would matter would be that his pieces would be living and hers would be dead.

He wasn't going to use guns—too noisy. His plan was to be long gone before the Port authorities discovered the bodies. Even his victims would not know he was there until they were in the process of dying.

* * *

><p>Usually Eve Baird had a sixth sense about when she was about to lead her team into an untenable tactical situation, but her first inkling of trouble on this mission came after they had acquired the target and neutralized the security guards. Their informant had not showed. Her only evidence that he had even existed was the single text on her phone. Nor did he reply to her return text. While it was possible that he had bolted, Eve considered his disappearance an anomaly that bore consideration.<p>

While Joscin and Derya secured the merchandise and their bound captives in the transport vehicles, Eve paced the length of the cargo container and back, trying to refine the cause of her unease. As the sky grew lighter, her worries took a more definite shape.

Derya contacted her with the news that their lookouts, Torbjørn and Fortinsky, had failed to report in.

"They're not answering their comms, and that's just weird," Derya said. "One of them might have power issues, but both?"

No one else on the team had heard anything from their missing members.

"They're not down here by the docks," Poptart reported.

"Keep trying to raise them," Eve ordered, scanning the area for any sign of a threat.

She could hear Derya quietly trying to make contact over comms, "Dammit, Fortinsky, Torbjørn, pick up the phone."

The pale dawn was suddenly breathless. The air grew chill, and her heartbeat accelerated. Nervous pricklings marched up the back of her neck. There had to be another element present here which she had not factored in to her mission calculations.

"Joscin and I are done here," Derya said, her voice tighter now and more intense. "We'll swing around where we know they were supposed to be and see what's going on."

Eve concurred and gave the order.

Moments later, Joscin's strained voice came over the comm, "Captain, we have a situation here. Someone attacked Torbjørn and Fortinsky. I think they might be dead."

Beside her, she sensed Lieutenant Brader stiffen. Her heart clenched, and she felt her mind frantically attempt to reject what she had heard.

In the background, Eve could hear Derya's voice, ragged and panicked. "No, no, no, hayır! O ölmedi! O ölmedi!" and Joscin's, gently correcting, "I can't find a pulse. I think his neck is broken. Derya, chéri, Je suis désolé. Il est mort. He is dead."

"Captain," Joscin said. "Torbjørn has had his throat cut, and Fortinsky's neck is broken. Their weapons are here, but the ammunition is missing."

They had gone so silently. Eve had heard no movement, no shouts, no sounds of a struggle. It seemed impossible, as the rose and gold sunrise lit the tops of the highest containers, that two of her team, her family, had crossed death's threshold. It was always a chance inherent in the jobs they did, but it should not have been a mystery. It should not have been something she could not fight.

"Get back, here," Eve ordered suddenly, not sure why she was so certain that they needed to be together. "Joscin, Derva, get back here now. Leave the bodies. We'll pick them up later."

If there was a later, she thought. In the back of her head, a niggling thought was trying to destroy her control: _Damien Moreau never loses_.

For a moment, she thought Derva would object, but her team knew her well, and when she spoke in that tone, they obeyed. Time enough to fight over orders after the situation was contained.

Brader was calling in the other members of the team who had been scouting for their informant down by the docks. Eve was grateful for his initiative.

However, it was already too late.

This time, she heard the fight go down when she lost the next four members of her team—muffled grunts, the thudding of fists on flesh, a cry of pain that cut off too suddenly, the sound of someone choking, the unmistakable crack of shattering bone.

Terror and anger surged in Eve's blood. She skidded around a bank of cargo containers, pelting towards those sounds. Behind her, she could hear the percussion of Brader's footsteps matching her own.

By the time they located the ruined bodies of their team mates, their adversaries had already vanished. Eve had no one to fight and everything to lose as she stumbled to her knees beside Teresinha, barely in time to feel the life draining from the young woman as she gulped for air that would never come. Her body armor had been inadequate to turn aside what must have been an exceptionally crafted blade. The single stab wound in her chest had nicked her pulmonary artery, and she bled out, drowning in her own blood while Eve tried in illogical grief to staunch the red tide with her bare hands.

Lieutenant Brader's rush to the other victims was equally in vain. When he returned to Eve, the hand he placed on her shoulder was shaking.

"Poptart's already dead," he said as though the words were knives on his tongue. "His throat is cut like Torbjørn's."

"The Twosome?" she asked, seeing the answer in his eyes as he gestured to where they lay together in a mangled twist of limbs, their necks identically broken, inseparable even in death.

"No," Eve whispered. "No. This can't be happening."

"Captain, we need to get back to the transport," Brader insisted, dragging her to her feet from where she was still holding Teresinha. "We have to get back to Derya and Joscin."

"Yes, yes, of course." Eve drew command around her like armor. She was a soldier. She'd seen men and women die in battle before. The important thing was to go on. Always go on.

She still had two other members of her team there. They needed to get to the transport vehicles and try to run. They needed to complete the mission that had already cost them too much.

Backup—they needed to call in backup. NATO had no forces in the area, but she could mobilize local law enforcement. Fumbling at her pocket with blood-stained fingers as they ran, she managed to extract the burner phone. "Spain. Emergency number," she panted. "It's 112, right Lieutenant?"

"Yes, Captain. Hurry!"

The five seconds it took her call to go through seemed like five thousand, but at last Eve was able to explain in Spanish from which all semblance of grammar had vanished that there were assassins at the Juan Carlos I Dock and officers were down.

The dispatcher on the line assured her that help was on the way.

It would come too late. Eve heard the transports roar to life before she rounded the corner to see that their captive guards had somehow been released and had hijacked the cargo her team had died to secure.

On the ground, obscured by the cloud of dust churned up by the departing 18-wheelers, lay the bodies of Derya and Joscin, hands reaching towards each other but not touching.

Beside her, Brader gave a choked cry, and she turned to him, never having heard him express an emotion under fire before. In horror, she saw his hands clasped around the hilt of a knife in his throat. His eyes pleaded with her, but she knew she dare not let her guard down one moment to help him.

Their enemy was here, and she had to find cover. As she sprinted towards the doubtful shelter of the cargo containers, she heard Brader's body hit the ground with a lifeless thud that broke her heart and set off such an eruption of rage and pain that she thought her body would ignite.

She needed to shoot someone so badly, to destroy whoever it was that had destroyed her team. But the dust settled over the three motionless bodies of her friends in silence. No adversary appeared on whom she could visit her wrath. Eve remained vibrating with tension against the long side of the container that was guarding her back. She could see more than 180 degrees, and if anyone came around the ends of the container, she would have time to prepare for the attack.

Far away and faint in the unearthly stillness, she could hear the sound of sirens, still minutes from the Port. Her traitorous body demanded she react to the deaths of her team, but Eve knew she could not afford to grieve. She needed clear sight and steady hands. She had to keep a cool head. Somewhere, nearby, death was stalking her.

In the end, all her anticipation did not prepare her for the abrupt appearance, right in front of her, of her enemy—not a team, just one man, like one of the dark shadows come to life. He had dropped from the top of the containers, which had to be at least 15 feet, and landed light and balanced, poised for his attack, a knife stained with gore in his hand.

She could not see his face—this lone man who had been able to take out a NATO counter-terrorism team single-handed—because he was wearing a helmet with a face shield spattered with the spray of arterial blood. But she knew she would never forget the way he moved—catlike and predatory, inhumanly swift.

He was well inside of the effective range of her weapon, but Eve didn't even care. Shooting him from a distance would not slake the vengeance thrumming in her blood. She wanted to crush him in her teeth, rip him to pieces with her bare hands, trample his body into the dust with her boots.

With a berserker battle cry, she launched herself at her adversary. Using the stock of her M-16 as a battering ram, she smashed it into his face shield with the entire force of her weight and momentum, hearing the crack, first of shatterproof polycarbonate, then of bone as his jaw snapped.

The two of them crashed to the earth, Eve driving her knee into his rib cage—not enough force left to break ribs, but crack them, maybe. His fist connected with the side of her head like the flash of lightning, and an intense narrow discomfort troubled her abdomen. His knife, she realized. He'd stabbed her.

She had to get that knife away from him before he slit her throat like the others. She was bleeding. Way too much. Rolling free of him, she kicked out, striking his wrist and sending the knife he held flying.

Eve tried to get to her feet, but the pain in her gut was slowing her, and her opponent was faster. She would have to work with what she had. Escape was not possible, so she threw herself at his leg, gripping just below the knee and somersaulted sideways, throwing him off balance, and—there it was, that had done some real damage. If she wasn't running anywhere, neither was he.

The sirens were louder now. Perhaps, if she could not win this fight, at least she could avoid losing long enough. If she could just keep moving . . . the loss of blood was making her light-headed.

Then he had her in a grip like jaws of iron. Eve felt her left shoulder dislocate, and then her other arm break. Her assailant followed those up with a blow, swift as a cobra, to her neck. Cartilage crushed, and her larynx collapsed.

Eve gasped in desperation, her hands, in spite of her injuries, scrabbling at the air as though she could clasp the oxygen in her fists.

She knew she was dying.

The last thing she remembered, as her final breaths rattled and gurgled in her chest yet brought no air, and the live fire in her skull narrowed her vision to a dark tunnel, was the impassive mask of her killer, crazed fractures running through his face shield, his own blood dripping steadily off his jaw, waiting, watching with inhuman patience for her to die.

* * *

><p>Eliot Spencer knelt beside the woman in a parody of tenderness, watching the life fade from the blue eyes that never left his, although he knew she could not see beyond his visor.<p>

The first time he had seen that awful glaze turn living eyes to dead and known that Death was taking a life by his hand, he'd been sure his own life would follow it—that he could not survive the pain. At that moment in time he would have given anything to have been able to have taken it all back, made another choice, even if it was only to die rather than kill. But he had brothers depending on him, a mission to accomplish, a nation to which he had sworn an oath.

In the end, he'd bricked up and plastered over the pain again and again so that no one, especially himself, would know it had ever been there. Eventually everything that had made him human was behind that wall.

He was an asset. Used by his government increasingly to do what no one else could do, what no one would admit had been done. Eventually the distinction between good and evil blurred, because he was always brutally honest about what he did. Any organization that crossed the lines he crossed, that turned a boy into a man who would cross those lines, did not deserve his loyalty. He still worked for them, on occasion, if the price was right. But there were others willing to pay more.

Now he killed clinically, mechanically—with carefully chosen force. That was why Damien Moreau trusted him. The others, like Chapman, were vicious brutes, getting pleasure out of the violence they committed and inclined to go to excess. Eliot Spencer got the job done. No more. No less. To exact specifications.

Now the creep of eternity over mortal features was merely a marker that he had completed the job. Painless. Irrelevant.

The crescendo wail of sirens and the sound of vehicles braking fast cut short his vigil. He had to go. The stubborn woman was still refusing to die, so he aimed one last precise blow to her head.

There now. She had ceased to fight. Her hands slumped limp to the earth. On sudden, irrational impulse, he brushed gloved and bloodied fingers over her eyelids, closing them.

With deft, dispassionate hands, he searched the NATO Captain's body and found the keys to the SUV.

"Thank you, darlin'," he murmured through bloody teeth. "This'll speed things up just fine."

Getting to his feet was an exercise in the power of his will over the reluctance of his body. For a minute, his stomach nearly raised an insurrection, as pain and nausea struck with double-fisted blows. Bent over gasping, Eliot fought grimly for the control to move. Slamming all acknowledgment of his physical condition behind barricades raised by sheer determination, he straightened, turned for the docks, and moved off at a limping run.

He needed to collect his prisoner and get back to the helicopter. Fortunately, with the gift of NATO's Beamer—he twirled the keys with satisfaction—he'd be in Morocco before the local LEOs had found half the bodies he'd left in his wake.

* * *

><p>As the shoreline of Spain fell away behind him, and the coast of North Africa loomed ahead, Eliot let the coils of tension binding him relax slightly. The traitor was trussed up and unconscious in the back of the helicopter. He had a brief visit to make at the fellow's home to leave Damien's signature warning to all other potential insubordinates. It was still a long and arduous day before he would reach Panama and the lovely Siobhan, although in his current condition, he was going to be a bit of a disappointment to her. But at least now he was sure he would make it.<p>

Damn, he hurt though. His jaw was probably going to require an actual doctor. He was going to demand a bonus from Damien for taking on that NATO Captain. She'd been a foe worthy of his talent as so few were these days. By the exertion of her valour, she had added a greater lustre to his accomplishment. No friend could have done more. He sent a mental salute in her direction.

In another life, under other circumstances, he would have liked to buy her a drink, find out what fire other than wrath could burn in those blue eyes. But Fate had decreed they meet in war, severing all chance of human fellowship, and only this subtle bond of association could remain between them—that the final testimony to the value of his victory he received at the hands of her whom he had vanquished.

* * *

><p>TBC<p> 


	6. Chapter 6

Title: By Paths Coincident 5/?

Author: Honorat

Rating: T

Characters: Jenkins, Eve Baird, Jacob Stone, Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, Parker, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Damien Moreau, Chapman, Others TBA as needed.

Pairing: Parker/Hardison, Cassandra/Jake, Cassandra/Eliot, just a touch of Eliot/OC

Disclaimer: Dean Devlin, John Rogers, TNT own these characters.

Description: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren't the only members of the two teams who've met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark.

By Paths Coincident

* * *

><p><em>11 Years Ago<em>

_Port of Algeciras Bay, Strait of Gibralter, Spain_

Doctor Mateo Villanueva Cortés, emergency physician, gripped the armrests of his seat as Jorge sent the Ambulancia de UVI móvil careening around the corner and into the Port gateway in a spray of gravel. Jorge always drove their mobile intensive care unit as if he thought it was a Formula One race car in the Grand Prix de Monaco, but he was outdoing himself today.

Mateo had been employed in the Servicios de Emergencias Médicas for over fifteen years, and he had never ridden with such a Jehu of driver as this one. It was a matter of honour for Jorge to arrive on scene before the Vehículo de Intervención Rápida, and once again he had succeeded. Mateo could see the amber lights of the rapid response team's vehicle in the side mirror. Jorge would be insufferable for a week.

Glancing back at Nadia, Mateo rolled his eyes. His emergency nurse was grinning, clearly enjoying the jolting ride in the back of the ambulance far too much. She and Jorge were menaces.

Ahead of them several cars belonging to the policía were clearing the way, reminding Mateo that this call was not like all the others. This was not an illness or an accident. There was a killer loose at the Port, and his team would be running into a war zone.

Jorge slowed the vehicle as two police officers jogged up to them, weapons drawn. He rolled down the window and leaned out.

"Can you tell us where to go?" Jorge asked. "The VIR is right behind us."

"Right this way," one of the officers gestured. "There's one victim still alive over behind that second row of cargo containers. The rest, I'm afraid, are very dead."

He had to shout the last sentence after them as Jorge left a layer of tyres on the asphalt. The VIR personnel would not be getting to the patient before Mateo and Nadia if Jorge could help it.

The ambulance screeched to a halt perilously close to a startled group of police clustered around one of four bodies Mateo could see.

Vaulting from the vehicle, kit in hand, Mateo sprinted to the side of the victim. All of the officers moved away except for two, one trying to staunch the blood from a penetrating abdominal wound, the other kneeling beside the non-responsive young woman and breathing into what appeared to be a cobbled together trach tube made from a repurposed ballpoint pen.

Behind him he heard Nadia and Jorge rushing in with the heavier equipment.

Nadia had been an emergency nurse for longer than Mateo had been a doctor, so she set immediately to attaching cardiac and oxygen monitors to their patient.

"She's not breathing on her own?" Mateo asked the young officer who was continuing his primitive airway management.

In between breaths, he shook his head. "No, her throat is crushed. She was turning blue when we got here. I can't tell if she has a pulse, but since she's still bleeding, something's got to be moving, right?"

"I'm getting a pulse," Nadia informed him. "Extreme tachycardia and diminished blood pressure, so it's no wonder you're not feeling it."

"You saved her life, young man," Mateo said. "Excellent work with the cricothyroidotomy."

"The what?"

Mateo indicated the tube.

"Oh," the officer said, "I read about it on the Internet."

_Dear God_, Mateo thought, _the fact that this woman is still alive is a miracle_.

She had obviously been the victim of blunt force trauma resulting in a laryngeal fracture. He suspected unstable laryngeal cartilage and massive mucosal injuries at the least, if not disruption of the anterior commissure. The resultant severe edema and haematoma had completely blocked off her airway.

"Nadia, what are her O2 sats?"

"74 percent," Nadia said, already busy starting an IV. "And dropping."

The makeshift trach had kept her alive, but it was insufficient. Hypoxemia was already affecting her organ function.

"We're going to have to perform a tracheostomy," Mateo told Nadia. He deftly began to prep the patient for the procedure while Nadia gathered the trach tube and the ventilator.

However, his patient's airway wasn't the only issue. Already she was exhibiting signs of hypovolemic shock. The woman had lost a frightening amount of blood, Class III, verging on Class IV hemorrhage. If he could not get her stabilized, her body was going to shut down.

"Put a second IV in," Mateo instructed. "We're going to have to give her enough transfusion to get her arterial pressure up to 40-50mmHg."

Pumping fluids into her system would be like trying to hold water in a cracked glass, but it was her only chance to survive long enough to make it to surgery.

Mateo was relieved when the Rapid Response team arrived from confirming the deaths of the other victims on site. The officers had remained, but their attention was turned outward, ready for another attack. Another pair of experienced hands was welcome.

Mateo was securing the trach tube and attaching it to the ventilator while Nadia was managing the transfusion. Having the VIR doctor and nurse meant that someone was able to check for other injuries and arrange for transport.

Observing both that her helmet had nearly been ripped off her head and that her pupils were unresponsive, the VIR doctor diagnosed severe traumatic brain injury with a Glasgow Coma Score of 2T. That meant they'd also need to treat her for possible cervical spinal injury, always a complication when dealing with a trach tube.

The fact that she had a dislocated left shoulder and a broken right arm seemed trivial in comparison.

Finally, their patient was receiving oxygen via the ventilator and trach; her blood supply was being augmented with saline and plasma; her neck, shoulder and arm were immobilized; and she was carefully maneuvered onto the gurney for transport.

They had done all they could for her, but it wasn't enough. His patient flatlined as they loaded her into the ambulance.

Asystole. She was dead.

Even defibrillation would have no effect, although they would try. With a feeling of despair, Mateo began CPR.

"Nadia, administer 1 mg epinephrine by IV every 3-5 minutes," he ordered. He could only pray that they could keep her brain alive long enough to get any kind of a rhythm re-established.

It was not far from the Port of Algeciras Bay to the Complejo Hospitalario Punta de Europa, but they covered the distance in record time. For once, Mateo was grateful for Jorge's ability to take an ambulance around a corner on two wheels.

* * *

><p><em>Complejo Hospitalario Punta de Europa<em>_, Algeciras, Spain _

The first thing she became aware of was sound. A woman weeping.

_Mom?_

Then everything was silence.

* * *

><p>She was surfacing through viscous blackness, trying to breathe. What was that infernal beeping? Why didn't someone turn it off?<p>

"Don't you dare leave us, Baby Girl. Don't you leave. You have to fight. You've always been a fighter, Eve."

_I won't, Dad, _she would have said, as she stopped fighting.

It was dark inside the silence.

* * *

><p>A shaft of memory, like light. She was six years old, and her father was teaching her to fire a gun. She smelled the acrid sulphur of the propellant.<p>

Smells. Disinfectant. Blood.

She was kneeling on rough pavement. Her knees were wet with blood. Blood was pouring over her hands. Someone was dying, and she could not stop it.

The darkness was a friend.

* * *

><p>A man, a stranger, speaking. "We've managed to repair the abdominal damage. Peritonitis is responding well to treatment. Intracranial pressure is being regulated through an external ventricular drainage system. All of her organs are functioning again. We've stabilized the architecture of her larynx with metal alloy plates, but as long as she's comatose, we'll be leaving in the trach tube and assisting with her breathing."<p>

Who was he talking about?

"But when will she wake up? It has been two weeks. If she's okay now, why doesn't she wake up?"

"Coma is complicated, and she is suffering from a skull fracture. We don't entirely understand why the body shuts down this way, but it may be in order to give it the rest and resources it needs to heal. Your daughter has survived a major trauma. She was a very fit and healthy person, and that gives her an advantage. Let her have the time."

The silence took his voice.

* * *

><p>A woman, a stranger, speaking in Spanish. Who speaks Spanish in Brussels?<p>

"Hello, love. My name is Gabriela and this is Ines. We're just going to move you so we can clean the sheets. Then we'll give you a nice bath, so you'll feel all fresh."

Another voice, also a woman. "Do you always talk to them?"

"Of course. You never know what they hear. It's a nice thing to do. I'd want someone to remember I was there if it happened to me."

"She probably doesn't even speak Spanish."

"She was a NATO Captain. Of course, she does."

_Was?_

There were strangers' hands on her body, moving her, but she could not move herself. Somewhere, off in the distance she thought there was pain, but it did not seem relevant to her. Warm, wet cloth touched her as if she were a soiled child. What had happened to her?

"There you go, love. All clean again. How would you like some lotion?"

The hands again, soothing. The lotion did feel good.

She was so tired.

* * *

><p>She spent her days and nights, undifferentiated, surrounded by sounds of machines monitoring her vital signs, pumping fluids and nutrients and medications into her, draining fluids out of her, rhythmically compressing her legs to keep her blood circulating. Sleeping and waking and dreaming bled into each other until she did not know whether she believed everything was real or nothing was. The only constant was the pain. The only interruptions were when people came into the room.<p>

Sometimes their voices blended into the sounds. Occasionally she understood entire conversations.

They handled her like she was a large and awkward doll, dressing and undressing her, bathing her, attending to her machines. Often they hurt her, moving her, taking blood, changing dressings.

Eve began to look forward to Gabrielle, the nurse who talked to her as she worked, babbling like a brook about the weather, her siblings, hospital gossip, the local news.

Eve was so very, very bored.

* * *

><p>Someone was reading to her. A romance novel? <em>Mom?<em> She had always been a bit of a disappointment to her mother—the daughter who wanted to be the hero instead of the heroine.

"I want the pretty dress and the sword!"

"My warrior princess," said her dad.

She smiled at the memory and heard the novel drop on the floor.

"Eve! She's waking up! Can you hear me? Oh, Eve."

Her mother was gripping her hand. Eve tried to answer, but her mouth made no sound.

"She's trying to say something! Eve, honey, you can't talk. Can you squeeze my hand?"

What kind of a question was that? She could carry a 100 pounds of gear at a jog over rough terrain for a 12 hour day. Of course she could squeeze a hand . . . except she couldn't.

"I can feel her trying!" Her mother was crying. "She's going to be okay. I know it."

The world faded to dark again.

* * *

><p>Eventually the time came when she could tell it was light. Should she open her eyes? No, it was too much work. Why did she hurt everywhere?<p>

"Ms. Baird." A new voice. Masculine. "I'm Dr. Andrade, your urologist. It's time to replace your catheter."

Where was the darkness when she needed it?

* * *

><p>Someone was stalking her, moving like smoke on the wind. He was dressed all in black—no insignia. His face shield was cracked and bloody, and he carried a knife. She could neither run nor fight. Her heart rate spiked as he plunged the knife into her stomach.<p>

Alarms went off.

He vanished like a shadow.

* * *

><p>The next time she awoke, she did open her eyes. Everything was a blur of unfamiliar shapes. There was nothing that she recognized. Her eyes felt like she'd been squinting through a desert sandstorm for a week, and she blinked trying to clear them of the dryness and grit. She was in a colourless room full of humming machinery. There were tubes in every possible orifice of her body and some impossible ones.<p>

She could not move, tied down by wire leads and plastic tubing.

She needed to move. It wasn't safe to stay here. Someone was trying to kill her.

Her struggles were setting off alarms. Why couldn't she just jump up and flee? Why didn't her body work?

Pain struck like the blowback from an IED. So much pain.

Voices shouting. She tried to call—to warn them.

Then the room was full of milling bodies. Hands tried to pin her down. She flailed at them, satisfied to hear them cry out, hating the fact that her arms refused to move at her command.

"Don't let her displace the EVD!"

"We need to sedate her before she damages herself!"

No!

A sharp pinch of pain and the world faded to darkness.

* * *

><p>The next time she was lucid, she could see clearly that a stranger was in the room. He wore an eye-achingly bright orange uniform with navy and silver stripes. She did not recognize the colours, but the emergency medical services patch on his chest let her know his profession.<p>

Paramedic. No. That was Spanish labelling him "Médico"—he was an emergency doctor. Which meant she was in Spain.

He noticed her observing him, and a smile crinkled up the lines of his face.

"Senorita, you are awake!" he exclaimed. His voice sounded choked and a glint of extra moisture shone in his eyes.

Why would a stranger shed tears for her? Eve tried to greet him, to ask who he was, but no words came.

"No, do not try to talk," he said, moving swiftly to her side and taking her hand in one of his. "You have had an injury to your larynx." He touched his other hand to his neck, demonstrating. "My name is Doctor Villanueva Cortés. I am médico de emergencias with the ambulancia that brought you here."

She wanted to ask him so many questions. Where was here? What had happened to her? What had happened to her team?

His hand was warm on hers, large and tanned. In contrast, her hand was so very pale and claw-like. Surely that boney, fleshless arm did not belong to her?

"I am so happy to see you alive!" he said. "We hoped and prayed, but we did not know if . . ." his voice trailed off. "It is wonderful, a miracle."

Eve needed to talk. Her right arm appeared to be encased in a cast, but she still had her left arm. Withdrawing her hand from the doctor's grip, she tried to pantomime writing.

"Ah!" the doctor exclaimed. "You would like pen and paper, I am sure. And you have family here who will be delighted that you are awake. I will take my leave of you and deliver your request."

No, Eve wanted to interrogate him.

"Farewell, Senorita," he said.

She closed her eyes, frustration alarming her monitors and exhausting her.

Sleep dragged her down before anyone else arrived.

* * *

><p>TBC<p> 


	7. Chapter 7

Title: By Paths Coincident 7/?

Author: Honorat

Rating: T

Characters: Jenkins, Eve Baird, Jacob Stone, Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, Parker, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Damien Moreau, Chapman, Others TBA as needed.

Pairing: Parker/Hardison, Cassandra/Jake, Cassandra/Eliot, just a touch of Eliot/OC

Disclaimer: Dean Devlin, John Rogers, TNT own these characters.

Description: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren't the only members of the two teams who've met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark. A short chapter about what Eliot was doing while Eve was not quite dying.

By Paths Coincident

* * *

><p><em>11 Years Ago<em>

_Villa El Otro Lado, Portabelo, Panama_

Eliot Spencer barely made it down the steps from Damien's plane at the very private airstrip in Colombia. His knee was swollen and excruciatingly painful. He suspected a torn ACL which was going to need surgery. But he couldn't go near a doctor until he was clear of any connection to the job that had gone down in Spain.

To make matters worse, his jaw was equally swollen and immobilized. He had been unable to take oral pain medication because the damned first-aid kit in the plane hadn't contained anything liquid or injectable. Eliot swore he was never going to take on a job again without a stock of IV pain meds instantly available. He'd finally crushed some extra strength Tylenol with the hilt of his knife, tried to dissolved it in water, and managed to use a straw to get it down. It had all of the effectiveness of trying to put out a volcanic eruption with an eyedropper.

Not to mention he was starving. It had been nearly 48 hours since he'd last eaten.

He forced himself to hobble to the Jeep he'd left concealed by the airstrip. Managing the brake, the gas, and the clutch with his bad leg left him sweating and nauseated. The crappy roads between the airstrip and the coast jarred his knee, his ribs, and his jaw unmercifully. And thanks to the fact that he couldn't open his mouth, he couldn't even alleviate his misery with profanity.

The boat ride, in the dark, navigating by GPS alone, was a hellish blur. By the time he reached Damien's private dock in the mouth of the river, out of sight of the tourist launches, he was ready to collapse, but he still had to commandeer one of the launches to make it to El Otro Lado.

He had reached the point where every step he had to take added a zero to the total amount he was going to charge Damien for this job.

When Siobhan met him just before dawn, as he slipped surreptitiously in through the tall window that opened onto the private patio of his villa, she gave a little cry of shock. He really must look terrible, Eliot thought before his bad leg gave out, pitching him headlong into her arms.

Siobhan Byrne was made of pure grit all the way through and didn't flinch as his dead weight and bloodied filth landed on the turquoise wisp of a negligee she was wearing. Instead, she supported his sorry ass to the chaise lounge where he finished his collapse.

Eliot mentally added another zero to how much Damien was going to be paying her.

Forty minutes later, Eliot found himself with his blood-encrusted clothing cut away, his leg elevated and packed in ice, his ribs also wrapped and iced, another ice pack pressed to his jaw, and most important, enough painkillers to drop a horse coursing through his veins.

The lovely and blurred Siobhan had apparently an eclectic education in field medicine. He wondered drowsily where she had got it.

He might have proposed marriage to her if he could have talked when she brought in a basin of warm water and began washing the blood and sweat off his face. It was probably a good thing he couldn't talk.

It had been 72 hours since he'd had more than a catnap. Eliot thought he felt Siobhan's lips on his swollen mouth briefly before sleep ambushed him and dragged him under.

He would have avoided the sleep altogether if he could have.

They lay in wait for him behind the curtains of his eyelids, as they always did, pale stains of past atrocities, new and bloody spectres fresh from the kill. Their eyes met his in that moment before they ceased to see, frozen in fear or rage or astonishment or pain or grief. Their voices, crying and screaming and pleading and cursing and choking, echoed in his ears. Their bodies twitched, writhed, crumpled, contorted, broke and bled out, re-enacting over and over the agonies of their deaths.

In continuous replay, he was forced to watch death turn living souls into inert matter. He could never scrub away the feel of their taken lives from his hands or his heart.

This time it was the eyes of the innocents that haunted him. The elderly mother and younger sister of the traitor, bewildered, unbelieving, terrified. The man himself, beyond fear for his family, sobbing his willingness to endure any torture if it would spare them. The eyes of the young man and woman at the transport vehicles, and the way they had tried and failed to reach each other for comfort. And the eyes of the NATO Captain, like those of an avenging Fury—full of wrath and grief. She had thrown herself at death in such courage and love.

The nightmare visions drove him out of sleep, pursuing him into consciousness, shaking and sick at heart.

Eliot lay still, breathing deliberately past the knifing guilt, muting the ghosts behind those fortified mental walls. It should have been getting easier to do so, and yet each time the task seemed more impossible; the emotions he had thought dead would shamble out of the dark and into the light where they had no right to affect him.

The dawn light of the Panama sun caressed his closed eyes as gradually his physical discomfort drifted back into his notice, a welcome distraction, although the meds were managing the worst of it. He was tucked in with warm blankets to counteract all the icepacks—Siobhan must have done that after he had fallen asleep. Perhaps he could bear to get up and find something liquid to eat. In fact something painful to do might succeed in banishing his mental unease.

Opening his eyes, he discovered that Siobhan had drawn up a small table and left an energy drink with a straw in it. If his jaw had allowed it, he would have smiled. The woman was a wonder.

Fortified by the hydration and calories, Eliot attempted to move his leg. Okay. That solved the problem of thinking about anything at all. Sheer, unadulterated agony. Just what he needed. He embraced the pain and forced himself first into a sitting position, then standing, wavering, supporting himself with a hand on the back of the chaise lounge. All his injuries protested the increased activity.

Let them.

He gritted his teeth in determination and then spent the next ten minutes regretting it as his vision went black, and his body threatened to pitch him back to the ground.

No moving his mouth. Check.

Eliot was in desperate need of a shower, shivering with the desire to wash all traces of the last three days from his flesh and from his soul. With slow, hobbling steps, he made his way to the pool shower. His master bathroom had a huge tub with jets that would feel wonderful on his aching muscles, but he knew that even if he could clamber into it, he'd never get out again without the assistance of a crane.

Taking that shower was equal parts bliss and torment. When he emerged, he felt a metric tonne lighter, as though the weight of all he had been through had drained away with the dirt. He needed to get dressed and contact Damien. It would have to be e-mail, he realized. Talking on the phone wasn't going to happen. Being non-verbal really sucked. He'd have to make an appointment to have his jaw fixed. If it had to be wired, he was adding another zero to his price.

Clad only in a towel, he made his limping way to his bedroom to find some sort of loose-fitting clothing.

Alone in the middle of his bed, Siobhan slept sprawled out on satin sheets, her face peaceful and free of makeup, her hair glittering like treasure around her. She was making funny little snores that he found completely adorable. He noted that she'd exchanged the frothy, sexy bit of fabric she'd been wearing, which he'd probably ruined with blood and grime, for a long t-shirt decorated with Elmer Fudd and the caption "Be Vewy Vewy Quiet!"

Eliot had to resist another smile. God, he could love this woman. Beauty and brains. A sense of whimsy and a kickass sense of humor. And most of all competence. Damn, competence looked good on a woman. And she already knew, at least a little, what he did for a living.

It was a good thing he had his injuries to back up his excuses for not joining her in that bed—even though his brain could think of many ways a man with a bad leg, no functioning mouth, and cracked ribs could nevertheless be extremely creative with his hands, and his body let him know it would totally be down with that idea. Even though making love to her would be the ideal way to drive away the shadows.

He reached out and gently threaded a fingertip through one of her curls, then pulled his hand away without waking her. _I'm sorry, sweetheart. You'll just have to tell those lies._

A woman like Siobhan deserved a man and not a monster.

Many men see what they fear most in their nightmares. Eliot Spencer, ever and always, awoke to find his nightmare in his mirror.

* * *

><p>TBC<p> 


	8. Chapter 8

Title: By Paths Coincident 8/?

Author: Honorat

Rating: T

Characters: Jenkins, Eve Baird, Jacob Stone, Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, Parker, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Damien Moreau, Chapman, Others TBA as needed.

Pairing: Parker/Hardison, Cassandra/Jake, Cassandra/Eliot, just a touch of Eliot/OC

Disclaimer: Dean Devlin, John Rogers, TNT own these characters.

Description: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren't the only members of the two teams who've met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark.

By Paths Coincident

* * *

><p><em>11 Years Ago<em>

_Complejo Hospitalario Punta de Europa__, Algeciras, Spain _

Her parents looked devastated. Which was odd, because they were smiling and so happy that she was awake.

Eve wanted to apologize for making them sad, for making them worry—again.

She was sorry for the new strands of grey in her mom's hair, for the puffiness around her eyes that meant she had been crying a lot and often.

She was sorry for the tremor in her dad's hands, for the way his eyes were seeing terrible memories as he looked at her. He had never discouraged her from being a soldier, but he had always known too well how precarious was the life into which she had followed him.

"I'm sorry," she would write if she could. The paper and pen were on the table, beyond her reach.

I love you, she tried to say with her eyes.

* * *

><p>Her father was the one who told her what she had already suspected from the fragments of her returning memory and the nightmares—that her team, all her friends, were dead.<p>

She appreciated that he made it a formal occasion, wearing his uniform, and delivering to her the handful of broken identification tags, one at a time, each as unique as the person who had worn it—issued by the country in whose armed forces he or she had originally served before transferring to NATO.

With fingers trembling from more than weakness, Eve traced the DEU on the half oval that had belonged to Lieutenant Brader, her stern and utterly reliable second in command. The other half had remained with his body. The two of them had dragged each other in and out of hot spots and warzones across half the planet, but she hadn't been able to pull him out of this one. She wondered where he had been taken, where they all were. She had not even been able to say good-bye.

Cradling the small bits of metal in her mostly immobilized right hand, she reached with her left for each dog tag her father handed her: Poptart's I disc, the rounded rectangle broken from its twin, inscribed with CDN FORCES CDN—it would have to be returned to Canada's National Defence Headquarters; Fortinsky's nieśmiertelnik wz.—he'd told her that meant "immortalizer mark"; the identical, circular, non-reflecting stainless steel tags, engraved "Big 6" that had belonged to the Terrible Twosome. Each tag dropped into her hand with the weight of a millstone on her heart. Derya, Joscin, Teresinha, and Torbjørn—these scraps of metal were the last touches she would have of them all. Her fingers folded over the so very tiny handful, clenching until the broken edges scored her palm.

Eve could not weep for them. All her tears caught in her ruined throat and knotted in pain but refused to be shed. She wanted so desperately to talk about them, to tell her father who they had been, how brilliant, how close. She wanted someone to share her feelings of loss.

Instead, her father sat with her in the silence imposed by her injury, letting her grip his hand.

She wondered about their families, the ones they loved. Derya's huge clan of brothers and sisters and cousins. Fortinsky's boyfriend. Oh God, Poptart's wife and little boy. Who had told them?

It should have been her, and she felt guilty that she was relieved that she had not been able to.

That night, they had to sedate her as she fought her nightmares.

* * *

><p>Eve endured the interminable days with increasing impatience interspersed with extreme lassitude. She could communicate only the most basic of needs with her shaky, left-handed writing and her persistent fatigue. Anything beyond, and her head would ache even more than it already did, and her vision would blur.<p>

Because she could not speak, many people did not speak to her. They talked to her parents or to each other as if she were not there, even when they were discussing her condition and treatment. Eve wrote a note in ragged, dark letters saying: TALK TO ME. She would thump the bed with her good hand and wave it at the person ignoring her. Generally, this resulted in an apology, and the offender would attempt to include her, but eventually old habits would take over, and Eve would find herself observing the conversation but no longer a part of it.

Some days Eve was simply too exhausted to care or even pay attention.

* * *

><p>Of all things, Eve hated most the helplessness, despised being dependent on others for every personal function. The day they finally helped her sit up, fighting dizziness, she refused to let anyone know how weak and unsteady she felt. Nevertheless, she did not badger them to allow her to stand. Accepting that she would be wheelchair-bound for the immediate future, she waited while all her tubes and bags and IV poles and other noxious accoutrements of illness were situated about her conveyance.<p>

She grimly endured the drum corps marching inside her skull and the way the world spun like a carnival ride as the aide pushed her chair to the bathroom where she might hope for an actual shower. Apparently she had over-estimated he ability to overcome her body's autonomic responses. The nausea brought about by the unaccustomed mobility overwhelmed her, and she vomited, nearly aspirating.

Not only did she fail spectacularly to achieve cleanliness, but she gained another CT scan out of her escapade.

Nevertheless, the next day, she insisted on trying again, gradually increasing her time upright. She wanted out of this hospital, and she wouldn't be able to leave until she could travel the eight hours from Spain to New York.

The fear that she would never completely recover from her injuries haunted her during her conscious hours while her sleeping hours were increasingly disturbed by memories returning in nightmares.

* * *

><p>As far as Eve could tell, she had many, many letters of the alphabet in many combinations, not one of which was an actual word. Apparently, her TBI was being complicated with CSF fistulae, which might be causing her persistent headache, and which, because it hadn't resolved on its own, was one of the reasons she had an EVD to relieve ICP. Obviously, the medical field was as bad as the military in its attachment to acronyms. The important piece of information in all this alphabet soup was that nothing appeared to be working, so she was likely to have to undergo a craniotomy to repair the fistula site—in other, more intelligible words, brain surgery.<p>

Perfect. As if her brains weren't already scrambled enough.

Brain surgery actually proved to be somewhat anticlimactic. She lost a day, but that had become a regular occurrence for her anyway. And her headaches did decrease in number and frequency. Also her neurosurgeon was a really attractive young man.

So there was that.

* * *

><p>When her otolaryngologist finally informed her that they would be removing the trach tube and the nasogastric tube, and that she might resume ordinary breathing, swallowing, and phonating, Eve was thrilled.<p>

The doctor informed her that they had repaired and reattached her vocal cords and reconstituted the anterior commissure as well as repairing all mucosal lacerations and closing exposed cartilage with mucous membrane grafts. They had then immobilized the cartilage fractures and reapproximated the strap muscles.

Eve listened to all the anatomical jargon with a blank expression and little comprehension. What she wanted to know was whether or not she would be able to talk.

This doctor, at least, waited while she laboriously printed her question: Will I be able to talk?

"It is impossible to say at this point," the doctor told her with an honesty for which she was grateful. "Barring any laryngeal nerve injury or arytenoid subluxation, your chances of excellent voice results stand at around 61 percent. However, if the nerves have been damaged enough to cause vocal cord immobility, those chances decrease to around 17 percent."

Since Eve knew her chances of having survived her initial injuries hovered around 10 percent, she figured 17 percent was pretty good odds. And she was so ready to begin eating again.

A plastic surgeon also visited her, but Eve was less concerned with that aspect of her recovery. If the scar on her throat was hideous enough, she'd just get a tattoo.

When Eve regained consciousness after the surgery, she was surprised to find herself afraid to attempt to speak. She had grown accustomed to believing that using her voice was forbidden and impossible, and perhaps she didn't want to know yet if the repair hadn't worked.

Her doctors and her parents were becoming worried that the surgery had been a failure, but Eve knew she had never tried to use her voice. She concentrated on enjoying the use of her throat—every swallow of liquid, every bite of very soft, blended food was a heavenly sensation.

It was frustration that finally cracked her mental paralysis. She was trying to reach the bathroom using her own actual legs. Since her brain surgery, the dizziness had diminished, and she was allowed to try out walking for brief intervals accompanied by a hovering aide. However, she had discovered that IV poles were possessed by the very devil. There were six wheels on the base, and each one would invariably head to a different point on the compass except toward the one for which she was aiming. The whole contraption would rotate as she tried to make it to the bathroom, winding up her tubing until it was too short once she did get there.

This day, she was so angry at the contraption which was surely designed by Torquemada, that she damned it to hell. It was a very quiet curse, and she did not recognize the voice, but it said what she was thinking.

Her babysitter squeaked in excitement. "You're speaking!"

Eve thought it was appropriate that the first thing she said after everything she had been through was profane.

* * *

><p>Eve was grateful to have any sort of voice back when General Deschamps paid her a visit. She was surprised to see him, since—since Teresinha— she stumbled mentally over the name—had developed a theory that he was physically attached to his office, like a snail.<p>

The sight of that familiar uniform twisted a longing in her. Such uniforms had meant home and family her whole life. Aside from how treacherously immodest hospital gowns were, she felt naked without hers.

The General came to her bedside and took her hand in both of his. His face looked drawn and his eyes sad, in spite of his smile. It had been his operation, and they had been his team, and it had been an utter failure with an appalling loss of life.

"Hello, sir," Eve said in her too quiet, strange voice.

"Hello, Captain," he answered. "Eve. It's good to see you."

He couldn't really comment on how well, she looked, Eve thought. She was only a couple of artfully applied ketchup packets away from a zombie cosplay.

"It's good to see you, too."

The General had never been much for small talk, so the conversation languished. He patted her hand, then withdrew his hands, returning to parade rest, taking refuge in formalities.

"I wanted to speak to you before you went home," he said. "You have been granted a medical discharge with all honour, of course."

Of course. There had been no other possibility. But Eve's heart twisted to hear it spoken aloud. She would not be fit to return to active duty for—for years, likely. If ever.

"Thank you, sir," she said, as she had to.

He cleared his throat. "I am sorry—to hear—what—happened to the others."

Eve clenched her hands and closed her eyes. "They were the best," she managed hoarsely.

The General nodded, but said no more.

Finally, Eve spoke. Here was someone who might answer her questions. "Were they able to find the man who did this?"

General Deschamps was silent for too long.

"We suspect it was Damien Moreau's chief enforcer, Eliot Spencer," he said, finally. "Spencer is certainly capable of what was done—before he went solo, he did work for the US government, both in the military and in assorted PMCs, that is so secret even I cannot get past the red tape. In fact no one in US Armed Forces or Intelligence will admit he exists. The rest of the world—well that is a different story. There is a price on his head in five countries."

A name. As long as they had a name, she could avenge her team. However, her look of fierce intention was shot down by the General's discouraged head shake.

"We have no real evidence. Spencer has an alibi placing him in Panama during the incident, even though it seems unlikely that he could have torn an ACL and broken his jaw in the bedroom."

Eve smiled grimly. At least, if she hadn't been able to kill him, she'd made him hurt.

"So how do we go about getting this guy?" she asked, as if she could have any part in such a manhunt.

"Did you see his face? Would you be able to recognize him and testify against him?"

Eve thought about the man who had murdered her team—no identifying marks, his face hidden behind the shield. "No."

"Then we don't have a case," the General said, frustration roughening his voice. "No court in the world would convict him with so little justification. There is no record of his departure from Panama nor his arrival anywhere else, and, while we know Moreau moves his people off grid all the time, that explanation will never hold up before a judge."

Her hands were shaking, Eve noted through the red haze of rage. "So he goes free," she said through gritted teeth. Her throat ached—with unaccustomed use or unshed tears.

"We cannot arrest a man with no evidence. We do not even have any surveillance. The Port cameras were damaged, their lenses broken out, so no footage remains of what happened."

Eve took several deep breaths to calm herself down. If they couldn't arrest the assassin, perhaps it would be better to go after the man actually responsible. "What about Moreau? Do we at least have something against him?"

Deschamps shook his head. "Damien Moreau covers his tracks perfectly. Our only possible link between him and the shipment you were to intercept was the testimony of our informant—who, along with his mother and sister, was the victim of a house fire, ruled an electrical malfunction, by the way. No arson suspected. But it may be years before anyone musters enough courage to turn on Moreau again." The General sighed. "We cannot touch him."

So there was to be no justice for her team. They had failed; they had died; and nothing could make any of it never have happened.

"Damien Moreau never loses," Eve whispered to herself.

"I'm sorry, Captain Baird."

Before he left, she gave him the dog tags of her team to return to their countries and families. Her heart broke as if she were losing her friends again.

* * *

><p>The day finally arrived when Eve was considered stable enough to travel from Spain to the United States. She would be transported by ambulance to the airport at Jerez, flown to Madrid, and then put on the long flight to New York where she would be met by another ambulance and transported to the hospital where she would remain until they judged her fit to be cared for at her parents' home and to begin her rehab.<p>

It seemed that the entire hospital staff showed up to see her off. She'd pretty much occupied time from every specialist and every department. Gabrielle was there giving her a tearful hug. Even the doctor from the ambulance was there, introducing her to his driver, Jorge, who was responsible for her most rapid transport to the hospital.

"We had to replace the tires after that ride," Doctor Villanueva Cortés said.

Jorge grinned and wrung her hand. "Always a pleasure to participate in a resurrection. You are a very lucky lady. You must have a very special destiny."

Eve did not feel lucky, and she did not believe in destiny.

* * *

><p><em>1 Year Later<em>

_Fort Hamilton, New York _

Back in the United States, living with her parents on the army base, going to rehab at the VA every day, doing a little teaching of new recruits to keep her occupied, Eve tried and failed to find her feet again.

With her returning health, clearer and clearer memories also crept out of the murky fog of her damaged brain, ambushing her.

Why did fictional characters get to keep their amnesia when she remembered everything? For her, returned and always returning, every scent, every scrape of boot on gravel, every fleck of blood dried on her hands, every knife-edge of terror, every pulse of soul-destroying rage, the present folded into the past. That day back at the Port fighting to save her team—and failing—was engraved in her brain. Their eyes followed her from every shadow, in every reflection, just beyond the edge of sight, accusing her for living when they had died.

Every night, her faceless opponent returned in her nightmares, forcing her to watch him murder her friends, her team, then turning on her until she awoke gasping for air, striking at shadows, and shaking so badly the bed rattled the floor.

Sleep became a memory. Eve fled it as desperately as she longed for it.

Nights found her running miles on the treadmill, sweat dripping down her body, heedless of pain. When her pulse beat so fast that her vision blurred, and her stumbling legs betrayed her so that she could run no farther, she would lift weights, working her barely recovered muscles beyond quivering exhaustion. When she could stagger to her feet again, she would beat her fists bloody on the punching bag.

Sometimes, then, collapsing on the nearest available surface, she could sleep un-tormented for an hour or two before the hell of her memory re-ignited.

She lost weight she could ill-afford to lose. Her eyes were sunken and shadowed in her increasingly gaunt face.

Her mother watched her with the tragic gaze of one who loves and who does not know how to prevent the loss of what she loves, knowing, as the wife of a career military officer, that not all of the dead come home in body bags.

It was her father who would stand in her doorway and call her out of the nightmares, waiting until she knew where she was and who he was before entering and enfolding her in his arms.

Her father held her the night she finally broke down and wept like a child—the first tears she had shed.

It was her father who convinced her to seek help.

Her dad, who at age 18 had donned his proud uniform and shipped out to the Vietnam war that had devoured his youth, chewed up his body and his spirit, and spit him out at age 30 with rank, a promising military career, a collection of old photographs of friends who never grew any older, and nightmares that still visited him 40 years later.

Even though he was gone now, she could still call up the memory of him, the feel of his old cardigan on her cheek, the scent of his aftershave, and the grieving understanding in his voice as he told her, "Sometimes, my Eve, no matter how hard you try, you lose. You do your best, but you just lose."

* * *

><p>TBC<p> 


	9. Chapter 9

Title: By Paths Coincident 9/?

Author: Honorat

Rating: T

Characters: Jenkins, Eve Baird, Jacob Stone, Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, Parker, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Damien Moreau, Chapman, Others TBA as needed.

Pairing: Parker/Hardison, Cassandra/Jake, Cassandra/Eliot, just a touch of Eliot/OC

Disclaimer: Dean Devlin, John Rogers, TNT own these characters.

Description: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren't the only members of the two teams who've met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark.

By Paths Coincident

* * *

><p>Eliot Spencer allowed himself one slightly deeper breath of relief. From the moment he'd seen that Colonel Baird both recognized his name and knew that he was the one who had slaughtered her team and done his best to kill her eleven years ago, he had not been sure whether she was going to launch a frontal assault or stand down. For now, at least, it seemed she was willing to settle for reconnaissance. He had no illusions that the confrontation was over.<p>

Hell, he wouldn't blame her if she called in all of NATO to take him out.

Perhaps it was a good thing Parker had lifted her phone and her gun.

Baird's one hand still hovered where her Glock would have been, but the other touched the nearly invisible scar at her throat—a scar that represented so many other unseen wounds. He did not think she was aware of that telltale gesture.

Eliot knew exactly what he had done to this woman. He had left her not breathing, with no detectable pulse. The fact that she was here, alive, spoke of an unbelievable will to survive in the face of incredible odds. But he also knew that she would count all the years of recovery from such major trauma as nothing in comparison to what he had done to her team.

He owed her a debt oceans deep in blood.

But this was not the moment, nor was he the one to set the terms.

She watched him, his victim in life rather than dreams, her eyes as beautiful now as they had been eleven years ago—and as angry. Wrath rose off her like smoke from an inferno. And beneath that anger, so much fear and sorrow. These were not fragments of memory and imagination excavated by his guilt to torment him. These were her real emotions.

His responsibility.

The knowledge carved into his heart like knives.

Their frozen tableau drew out to an awkward eternity, only he and Baird understanding why, the others merely worried and confused.

Miss Manners had provided no script for polite conversation with a woman one had left for dead nor for how she should respond to her murderer.

It was Hardison, bless him, who unthawed first. With all the panache gained from his childhood years sporting a bowtie door to door selling salvation, the young man flashed a brilliant smile, extended his hand in patented Sophie-subverting-an-entire-nation fashion, and said, "Pleasure to meet you, Ms. Baird. My name is Colin Hartnell."

Oh. Damn. Right. Aliases. At the moment, Eliot could not have told what names they were running the Brew Pub under if his life depended on it. Whatever rational fragment of his mind remained noted that he hadn't been this shaken in . . . he could not remember how long. There had been no point in his giving a false name, since Jake would know the truth, but there was no need to blow the others' cover stories.

As though she had to come back from a great distance, Colonel Baird drew her hand from where she had no weapon to draw and took Hardison's hand briefly.

"And this," Hardison continued, pulling Parker forward, "is Martha Tyler."

Parker moved as though she had forgotten her knees bent. In situations of intense personal emotion, their thief still had a tendency to go a bit wooden.

"Oh. Yes. Of course. I'm Martha." Parker smiled. At least her smiles no longer left people the impression that they did not ever want to meet her alone in dimly lit places—unless, of course, they really didn't.

Jake joined in the heroic effort to diffuse the situation, shaking first Hardison's and then Parker's hands. "Great to meet you Mr. Hartnell, Ms. Tyler."

"Please." Hardison's voice was all warmth and welcome. "It's Colin. You're practically family."

"Martha, that's me!" Parker piped up, following Hardison's lead in her own way.

"And this is Ezekiel Jones." Jake introduced the last member of his team, the Australian, judging by the little of his accent Eliot had already heard. "He's in . . . um . . . acquisitions."

He noted that Hardison and Parker exchanged glances at that name, as though it meant something to them; however, he got no sense that the recognition involved any threat.

Ezekiel, too, participated in the obligatory handshake.

By that time, Eliot had developed the beginnings of a plan. Food. Sophie always told them that sharing a meal was a way to build connections, hard-wired in the primitive part of the brain. The sanctity of the guest was not as intrinsic to American culture as it was in the Middle East where he had spent so much time, but the psychology existed. His cousin and colleagues had come to the Brew Pub to eat. Perhaps he could say to Baird with food what words could not say—that he wished them no harm, that they were safe here.

"Why don't you finish looking at the menu," he said to the group at the table, as they reseated themselves, even Baird, although she looked like she would rather be standing at parade attention or perhaps barricaded behind the bar and packing an M-16. "Dinner's on the house tonight. And I have a couple of specials not on the menu I'll throw in as well."

"That's mighty generous of you." Jake grinned up at him. "But I insist you and your friends join us. That is if you have the time?"

There was nothing to be done but accept the invitation with grace. At least the resulting shuffling of chairs and adjusting of their occupants allowed Parker to un-pick everyone's pockets. She settled into her seat with a bounce, her they're-making-me-give-everything-back scowl replaced by a laser-focused, homicidally cheerful, unnervingly curious, tooth-glitteringly hungry smile.

"So, Jake, what was Eliot like when he was a kid?"

Eliot fled for the refuge of the kitchen. He'd just send Amy out to take orders after all.

* * *

><p>Jacob Stone watched as his long-lost cousin departed in what looked suspiciously like a strategic retreat. The atmosphere around their table remained stormy, but with Eliot's exit, the lightning strikes were gone and only the far off rumble of thunder remained. Something powerful and terrible was going on involving Eve Baird and Eliot Spencer.<p>

He had seen Baird fight off assassins with a barstool, shoot a Minotaur in the balls as she slid beneath its legs, and crash land a cargo plane using instructions off of Google, but he'd never seen her this shaken. The past was a dark cave from which monsters could crawl, Jake knew, but what was it about his cousin's name that had called forth such creatures for the impervious Eve? Whatever it was, Eliot had known. And yet Eve had not recognized Eliot. Of course. Or she would have recognized Jake's face months ago.

He was going to have to corner Eve and ask.

He could not ask Eliot—that or any of the questions to which he really wanted to know the answers. The one that marched in majuscule letters across his mind, reducing all others to obscurity, was _Why?_ Why had Eliot stopped coming home? Why had he stopped calling or writing? What could possibly have been worse than letting his family wonder if he were still alive?

Eliot was family, but they were now practically strangers to each other; whereas Eve was fast becoming more than just a colleague. She was a friend.

In the new configuration, he was seated next to her, and he scrutinized her carefully for clues to what had just gone down. She looked broken, and Jake had never seen Eve break. Not when she'd been dragged backwards up a staircase by a spirit, leaving her so injured she had needed his help even to stand. Not after she'd been shattered across the planet delivering hope enough for the sorry old world to survive another year. Her eyes, fixed on the point where Eliot had disappeared, held a bleak sort of rage, but also the wounded look of a frightened child—an image he had never associated with either her uptight military persona or, lately, her more relaxed but fiercely protective mama bear side.

Her hands were clenched precisely shoulder-width apart on the table, as though she did not know what to do with them if she could not hit something.

Sliding one arm along the back of her chair, he could feel the tension vibrating in her shoulders. With his other hand, he covered her fist nearest him.

"Colonel Baird," he said softly. "Eve? Are you okay?"

Eve seemed to come back to herself then, shaking her head as though to re-set some doomed train of thought. Closing her eyes and taking a deep quiet breath, Eve opened them again, seeing him this time.

"I'm fine," she said, and he almost did not hear the shiver in her voice. "I'll be fine."

She did not look fine, but Eve was as tough as nails, and he had no doubt she would be. Even now, reminded of their existence, she was pulling herself together.

"Thanks," she said softly, and she smiled at him.

He squeezed her hand and released it.

The other occupants of the table had remained silent, the awkwardness as thick as clay.

At this juncture, their waitress arrived bringing drinks. Everyone looked relieved at the interruption.

"Oh, good," Martha said. "Here's Amy."

The table began to unfreeze as the beverages were passed around.

Eliot had apparently ordered for his friends, because Amy had something for everyone.

"Here you go, Boss," she said, handing Colin a shockingly orange soda. Martha's poison of choice turned out to be hot chocolate with colored marshmallows and a candy cane stir stick.

And these people ran a Brew Pub? Jake shrugged and gratefully took a swig of his beer. Eliot seemed to work with some odd people, but then who was he to talk.

The fact that Ezekiel's drink proved to taste as bad as Amy had advertised removed a little more of the fraught atmosphere.

The look on the thief's face as he considered which course of action was the lesser of the two evils—to spit or swallow—was worth the price of admission.

Cassandra laughed until she couldn't breathe.

Colin pretended to take umbrage at everyone's lack of appreciation for his art.

And Martha looked entirely too much like she was hoping Ezekiel would turn purple and go up in smoke.

At least Amy had thoughtfully provided a tankard of the regular house brew for him to wash away the taste. Jake resolved that she should receive a generous tip.

However, the easing of strain did not extend to Eve. Jake casually did not remove his arm from the back of her chair. He could feel her pressing back against him, as though steadying herself.

* * *

><p>Now that Eve had her whiskey, she realized there was no way she was going to be drinking it. Her feelings were already edging on a turbulence she could ill afford. Alcohol would only put her more off balance. She was grateful for Stone's silent support. So often now, they all depended on him to be their rock in the midst of chaos.<p>

When Spencer had disappeared her adrenaline had spiked. That was a man she needed in her sights at all times. He wasn't safe at any time, but he was even more unsafe when not visible.

For Eve everything had condensed to one point—extraction. Ezekiel Jones, Cassandra Cillian, and Jacob Stone—she had never meant to feel this way about a group of people again. It was the height of irony that she should cross paths with Spencer again, just when she had bonded with another team. She had to get this team, this time, out of this situation alive.

Food held all the appeal of ashes to her now, but she knew she needed to replenish her energy after such a strenuous day.

Everyone was placing orders. Since he was getting his meal for free, Ezekiel ordered the most expensive dish on the menu. Of course, he would.

Eve finally settled on a salad.

"Eliot's chili is the best," Martha suggested. "It's his own version of his mama's recipe."

Stone raised his eyebrows, "I'm gonna have to try that. I haven't had that chili since, well, since my aunt died."

Colin and Martha focused on him expectantly. But Stone just gestured to Cassandra who also ordered the chili.

When the waitress had departed, Martha rounded on Stone like he was a treasure vault she needed to break into.

"I still want Eliot stories," Martha insisted. "Tell!"

* * *

><p>TBC<p> 


	10. Chapter 10

Title: By Paths Coincident 10/?

Author: Honorat

Rating: T

Characters: Jenkins, Eve Baird, Jacob Stone, Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, Parker, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Damien Moreau, Chapman, Others TBA as needed.

Pairing: Parker/Hardison, Cassandra/Jake, Cassandra/Eliot, just a touch of Eliot/OC

Disclaimer: Dean Devlin, John Rogers, TNT own these characters.

Description: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren't the only members of the two teams who've met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark.

* * *

><p>The blonde young woman's eyes were wide and eager as she demanded tales about Spencer's childhood, and for an instant, Eve was reminded a bit of Cassandra. Stone was going to be putty in Martha's hands.<p>

Stone smiled at her. "That was a long time ago."

Bowing his head for a moment, he seemed to consider what he would say.

The Librarian team was scarcely less curious than the Brew Pub crew. Cassandra leaned forward and fixed her attention on Stone.

Finally, he raised his head and smiled. "I remember back when we were, oh, maybe three or four years old. Well, I don't remember much, but everyone always told this story. We were at a birthday party at a neighbor's, and Eliot went missing. Eliot went missing a lot." He tilted his head and wrinkled his forehead. "Come to think of it, that was a bit of an omen. I reckon his mama would have liked to tie him up if it hadn't been illegal in the state of Oklahoma. At first the parents just milled around calling his name as usual, but it became apparent that he really had vanished. Everyone started to panic. They called his daddy at work, because it looked like a major search would have to be made. His daddy asked if there were any animals nearby. Well, there was a stud farm next place over."

"What's a stud and how do you farm it?" asked Martha.

Stone laughed his hearty, carefree laugh. "Sorry. Country vocabulary. Horses. They raised horses."

Martha shuddered. "Ugh. I don't like horses. Is this a scary story?"

"Mama, those horses been dead for years." Colin reassured her. "They won't hurt you."

"It's not a scary story," Stone said.

"Okay," Martha agreed. "What happened to Eliot?"

"Well." Stone leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his stomach, getting into his yarn. "They found him in the barn playing in the stallion's stall, under its feet. He was petting its legs and plotting how he could get on its back. That big ole' fellow was just standing there, not moving, like he was afraid he'd step on the little guy. Everyone agreed it was a miracle like Daniel in the lions' den."

"I like lions," Martha exclaimed. "What's that story?"

"Seriously?" Colin looked at her with a mixture of pity and incredulity. "You never heard that one? Babe, you and me gotta do some remedial readin'."

"Oh, good!" said Martha.

"I just think it was Eliot," Stone said. "He always had a way with animals."

"Do you think Eliot would like a horse?" Martha asked Colin.

"You don't like horses," Colin pointed out with exaggerated patience.

"I know, but we could keep it on the roof, and I just wouldn't go up there."

Eve's impression that Martha did not interface with the world quite the same as most people strengthened.

"How would you get it up there? What would it do there? Besides, you're always on the roof," Colin said.

Martha frowned, perplexed. "Oh. Right. Where can you put a horse in Portland that I don't go?"

"There might be a stable somewhere you could board a horse," Stone offered, looking amused.

Martha granted him a dazzling smile. "It can be his birthday present," she decided, as though her every whim was a possibility.

"We'd better let Eliot pick his own horse," Colin said reasonably. "We don't know nothin' about horses. We'd probably get one that was missing, oh, I dunno, a leg or somethin'."

"That's silly," Martha said. "Even I know they have four legs. Hey," she turned to Stone. "You know about horses, right?"

"A little," he said cautiously.

"Then you can pick Eliot's horse." Martha settled back in satisfaction, as though, as far as she was concerned, she'd solved all the problems inherent in horse ownership.

No, they were not going to continue to be involved in Eliot Spencer's life nor the lives of his associates nor in the acquisition of his livestock, Eve thought vehemently. Besides, if there were any justice in the universe, Spencer would be locked up like the criminal he was and the key forgotten—she was only willing to consider granting him a stay of execution for Stone's sake.

Stone wisely didn't push the issue. "Here's another one about Eliot and animals," he said, successfully diverting Martha from the subject of horses. "Our daddies took us hunting up in Minnesota when we were ten. Eliot disappeared, of course. By then nobody worried much about him. He always came back. But this time he came back with his arms full of a half-grown wolf pup. It was about as big as him. His daddy nearly had a heart attack. Eliot wanted to keep it as a pet. I thought a pet wolf would be cool; however, the adults convinced Eliot that its family would be heartbroken if it didn't come home, so he agreed to take it back where he found it. But he was very grumpy about it."

Martha clapped her hands. "Do you think Eliot would like a wolf? We could keep it with the horse."

Cassandra giggled. Ezekiel smirked. Stone's eyes widened.

It was up to Colin to point out, "The wolf would want to eat the horse."

"Oh." Martha sounded disappointed.

"Besides, it's illegal to keep a wolf in Oregon." Colin finished what he obviously thought was an unassailable argument. He underestimated his colleague.

"We could fix that, though. Couldn't we?" Martha said brightly, as though state legislation were something anyone could change on a whim.

"Girl, we are not gettin' a wolf." Colin put his foot down.

"We never get to have anything fun." Martha pouted.

* * *

><p>Story time was cut short by the arrival of the food. Amy and Spencer came out carrying trays. Eve's nerves twitched uncomfortably.<p>

"Oooh! Black noodles! My favorite!" Martha exclaimed.

"That's tagliolini nero con gamberi," Spencer protested, all huffy chef. "Get it right!"

"That's right. Black noodles." Martha beamed at him, and Spencer rolled his eyes but unthawed a little. "I made 'em because I know you like 'em," he said.

"Eliot always cooks for me," Martha informed them. "He makes the best Fruit Loop pancakes!"

"That sounds . . . sweet." Cassandra said.

"How is that even a thing?" Colin complained. "And you put whipped cream and three different kinds of syrup and chocolate sauce and candy sprinkles on them. I get diabetes just watching you eat them."

"Says the man who lives on orange soda and gummi frogs," Spencer said, raising an eyebrow at him.

"That is food that technology made. Nothin' better," Colin said smugly.

"Well I ain't cookin' edible paper for you," Spencer growled. "I am wasted on these barbarians," he told Stone as he served samples of the oddly colored pasta for all of them to try.

Eve decided it was unlikely Spencer would try to poison any of them in his own restaurant—particularly his cousin—so she nodded briefly when he looked at her questioningly, and allowed him to give her a small amount.

"You just all about the stone knives and bearskins, ain't you?" Colin complained.

"If you mean cookin' real food from real ingredients grown in an actual garden. Yes," Spencer said with vehemence.

Eve could almost see Ezekiel's ears prick up and swivel.

"'The City on the Edge of Forever,'" he exclaimed.

Colin's face lit up. "My man! Original Trek or the reboot?"

"Definitely, the original!" Ezekiel said.

The two geeks exchanged congratulatory fist bumps.

"Oh God, not another one," Spencer groaned. "Somebody head them off at the pass, or we are gonna hear the entire history of Star Wars from the first Doctor to the second Khan."

Ezekiel and Colin turned identical outraged stares at him, mouths open to start in on such sacrilege.

Spencer tossed his hair, laughing. "Gotcha!" He pointed a victorious finger at Colin.

"Philistine," Colin said, glaring at his friend.

How could a man like Eliot Spencer be this—charming, Eve wondered. He treated these people not like colleagues but like family. How could someone with that amount of blood on his hands even care about another human being?

"Eliot has an organic garden on the roof," Martha said. "He doesn't ever sleep, so he can grow his own food."

"I sleep," Eliot protested, seating himself next to his cousin. He had served only a small amount of food for himself.

"Ninety minutes a day is not sleep. That's a nap," said Colin.

Eve glanced at Spencer sharply. There'd been a time in her life when getting ninety minutes of sleep would have been all she could manage, too. She knew with terrible intimacy what kept a victim of trauma awake at night. She wondered what kept a villain awake.

The unlikely agricultural discussion continued above her wandering thoughts.

Colin amped up his accusatory tone. "We have chickens. On the roof! In Portland! There is chicken shit on my building! What kind of person does that sort of thing? I'm sure there's some sort of bylaw."

"There used to be—before you made it go away," Martha commented with her mouth full of noodles that hung from her chin like a pirate beard.

"If you get to compost in my kitchen, I can fertilize my garden however I damn well please," Spencer retorted.

"Hey, you use that compost."

The argument between the two men felt like an old garment—old and often worn, falling into easy and familiar lines. The affection underlying their bickering was palpable.

"These are amazing," Ezekiel told Spencer, gesturing with his fork. "Top notch."

"Totally yummy," Cassandra agreed.

Stone nodded his head. "And this—I don't remember even your mama's chili bein' this good."

Spencer shifted a little, and Stone nodded his head slightly in acknowledgment of some memory only the two of them shared. But neither of them spoke of it.

Eve pushed her salad around on her plate taking an occasional desultory bite. She hadn't touched the pasta. Her stomach was too tied in nervous knots to welcome food, even though she knew she was hungry.

For all his easy conversation with the others, Spencer never lost the tension in his awareness of her. He smiled and laughed and chatted with her team—her team! And with his people, he was affectionate, teasing. But every time she moved, even so much as shifted her weight, his eyes were on her.

She followed Spencer's movements, too, not caring that he knew she was staring at him. Thugs with nuclear bombs could not shake her because they were no match for her training, but this man was something else entirely. He was the most dangerous opponent she had ever faced, because he was himself a weapon, one she knew was superior.

"So, Eliot." Cassandra's voice was eager. "What was Jacob like when you were kids?"

Eve saw the smile Spencer gave Cassandra—flirty and admiring and openly focused on her. For an instant Cassandra responded to that look on that familiar face like a flower turning toward the sun, eager and relieved and so happy. It was heartbreaking, actually. Eve had been aware of how Stone's lack of trust was troubling Cassandra, but she had not realized how heavily that hurt weighed on the girl until she saw it ever so briefly lifted.

Spencer looked a little rocked by her response. Admittedly, Cassandra in full joy mode was stunning.

Stone frowned ever so slightly as though he were trying to decipher a particularly difficult passage in a manuscript.

_That's right, _Eve thought at him. _Pay attention to what you're missing._

"Yeah, Stone here has been ratting you out. Time to turn the tables," Ezekiel said to Spencer.

Spencer directed his attention away from Cassandra, who had blushed and cast her eyes down in confusion. Really, it was a very good thing they were never coming near this Brew Pub again if Eve could help it.

Waggling his eyebrows at his cousin, Spencer asked, "So Jake, what should I tell 'em?"

"This is not gonna be pretty, is it?" Stone's tone was resigned.

"What do you mean?" Spencer widened his eyes. "I was the one always in trouble. You were the good one."

"What use was that when no one could tell us apart?" Stone asked. "I seem to remember getting punished for a number of things you did."

"You needed better alibis. Reading books doesn't leave many witnesses to your innocence." Spencer turned to the rest of his audience. "All the other guys kept _Playboy_ stashes under their mattresses, but not Jake. He kept copies of _The Odyssey_ and _The Iliad_. In Greek."

"You snooped?" This many years later, Stone still sounded a little betrayed.

Spencer shrugged insouciantly. "Course I did. I was lookin' for _Playboy_!"

At Ezekiel's incredulous look, Spencer scowled. "What? It's not like we had pictures on the Internet back then!"

"Well, thanks for not telling, I guess," Stone said.

"I ain't a snitch. You got beat up enough as it was."

Cassandra's hands went to her lips to contain a pained little gasp. Eve knew she was imagining the brilliant child Jacob Stone had been, trapped in a world that despised everything he loved and that made its rejection of him as physically and mentally abusive as possible.

"I sucked at blendin' in, didn't I?" Stone shook his head.

"You kinda did," Spencer agreed.

"Until you taught me how to fight back." Stone exchanged a teeth-bared grin with Spencer.

"Yeah, well, I met my own share of bullies. Finally figured out they were basically cowards. Bloody a few noses, and they're the ones runnin' home to mama."

The two men contemplated those past defeats and victories.

"Did that make us bullies?" Stone asked.

"No way," Spencer shook his head. "We never started any of it. Though I mighta had a little too much fun doin' it."

Stone shook his head in resigned fondness. "You were a holy terror, that's what you were. Remember the wasp nest in the tractor?"

"No. No you don't. You are not telling that one." Spencer clapped a hand over Stone's mouth.

Stone tried to peel him off, but he was no match for Spencer. The mumbles from behind the hand might possibly have been "You can't stop me."

Eve had to force herself to breathe. Spencer could so easily snap someone's neck from that position. But he wouldn't. Not his cousin. She would not launch herself across Stone to throttle Spencer. She would not. Her hands clenched in her lap.

Narrowing his eyes and baring his teeth, Spencer leaned forward until he was eye to eye with Stone. "Oh, yes I can. Three words—Firecracker. Mason jar."

Stone glared at him. _You wouldn't._

Spencer shrugged and smiled but did not remove his hand. _Oh, yes I would._

Finally Stone raised his hands in surrender. Spencer removed the restraint and sat back, brushing his hair back and smirking in triumph.

"You win," Stone said. "But this isn't over."

"Mutually assured destruction, mate?" Ezekiel asked.

"You have no idea," Stone groaned.

Cassandra, Colin, and Martha erupted in a cacophony of complaints at having the stories cut short, but the cousins exchanged significant glances and refused to say another word on the topic.

* * *

><p>The brew pub was much emptier now. The dinner crowd had thinned down. Eve sat with her chair pushed away from the table and back against the wall, withdrawn from the group. She had eaten little and drunk even less.<p>

Spencer was regaling the table with another story about his and Stone's misadventures when they were children—something about trying to re-create the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk from the roof of the shed that had resulted in broken bones for one and something called a whuppin' for the other. The two of them had had such normal childhoods. Families no more dysfunctional than average. Somehow, she had expected a man like Spencer to have possessed some deep, dark past that would make more comprehensible the monster he had become.

Of course, if Spencer had anywhere near Stone's tenacity for keeping himself private, he would avoid revealing anything he did not carefully choose to show strangers, friends, or enemies.

Cassandra was watching Stone and Spencer like a kitten with a pendulum, following every movement, completely fascinated with this missing piece in the puzzle that was their art historian.

Ezekiel was listening bright-eyed like a crow waiting for a shiny opportunity to make Stone uncomfortable. Sometimes Eve thought winding up Stone was one of Ezekiel's favorite pastimes—at least when he didn't have something to steal.

"So," asked Ezekiel. "Did you two ever switch places?"

"Oh, yes," Spencer grinned. He raised an eyebrow at Stone. "I think the first time was when you won that poetry elocution contest in fifth grade and were all set to go to the regional finals."

Stone sighed, "Yeah, and my daddy refused to let me go—poetry was for sissies and mama's boys. No son of his was gonna have anythin' to do with poetry. I think he'd have been happier if I'd ended up in Juvie."

"So, you forged the permission slip so the principal would take you, and I went home to your place after school."

"And when we got back that night, I had to climb a tree and crawl over the veranda roof to get in the window," Stone said. "My mama was not happy with the state of my best clothes the next day."

"You think your mama wasn't happy. You shoulda seen mine when I got home after midnight! Talk about all holy hell breakin' loose. And my daddy . . . well, you can imagine."

Stone looked like he could indeed. "I'm sorry. If I didn't say it then, thank you."

Spencer laughed, "Hey, no problem. You always tried to stay out of trouble. Everyone expected me to get into it. Most of the time I was payin' for my own crimes. I'm sure I got away with somethin' for which I deserved that!"

"Did you win?" Cassandra asked Jacob.

"What? The regionals? Yeah, I suppose I did. Didn't matter. There wasn't any way we could have pulled off a similar stunt for State." Stone paused. "It was another thing when our football team went to State—the whole dang family on the frontlines, cheering."

"Did you win that?" Ezekiel asked.

"No. We made 'em fight for it, but we lost."

"Speaking of trading places," Spencer said, "I'd never have graduated from high school if it hadn't been for Jake, here. He took two of my final exams for me while I hitched a ride to Oklahoma City to sign my brand new 18 year old self over to the US government."

"Wasn't the first time I covered for you and skipped my own classes," Stone said severely.

"C'mon, Jake. We all knew you could've taught those classes." Spencer laughed.

"Didn't fool Aimee; did I?"

Colin's and Martha's attention intensified, as though they recognized the name.

Spencer grinned. "Hey, I told you, you shoulda let her give you that kiss for luck!"

"Right. Like she wouldn't have noticed that I had only half an idea what I was doing? And I woulda had to keep meetin' her in church!" Stone's impatience verged on anger. "Eliot, that girl was too good for you. She waited for you to come home to stay far past reason or sense."

"I know. It was a good thing she finally moved on." Spencer looked pensive. "God, I was so glad to shake the dust of that town off my feet. See the world. 'Be all you can be in the Army,' you know. But I'd always meant to come home, eventually." He was silent for a moment, his face clouding over. "They didn't tell you it was also 'Be everything you never wanted to be' as well."

Stone eyed him questioningly, but Spencer did not continue.

Somewhere, at some point, a young Eliot Spencer—who'd managed to escape the small town quicksand that had sucked in and suffocated his cousin—had been crushed and remade into the kind of killer who could work for a man like Damien Moreau. Eve shivered.

Spencer got up abruptly, startling Eve into fresh alarm, as though some thought his words stirred was too uncomfortable for him to remain seated.

"I'll go get the dessert," he said, his voice sharp.

Her eyes tracked him as he rose and headed for the kitchen, tension ratcheting up as he disappeared from sight. Her every instinct was on high alert.

The continuing conversation of her remaining dinner companions faded from her awareness. Eve felt again the still silence of that fateful Port, waiting for an inevitable attack. Her hand instinctively caressed the spot where her gun had been. Shocked, she realized it had been returned. But the weight of it told her it was no longer loaded. How had Spencer returned her gun? He had not been near her, she thought. Panic tried to rise to the surface. Anomalous incidents meant she did not have sufficient intelligence. Insufficient intelligence was how she'd gotten her first team killed.

Spencer's return scarcely set her at ease even though he seemed to have recovered his equanimity. The corners of his mouth turned up, and the crinkles around his eyes suggested the smile might be genuine.

But her instincts were correct. Something was going wrong.

Because she was watching Spencer's face, she recognized the moment the killer emerged from behind the façade of charming host. His pleasant expression vanished into one of wrath so cold, Eve shuddered. His eyes must have held that same look behind that blood-spattered shield eleven years ago—merciless and predatory.

One instant, like any ordinary restaurant employee, he was carrying two heavy ceramic platters loaded with something steaming; the next, his entire body language changed. The platters were no longer food transport but potential weapons as the muscles in his arms flexed and his fingers sought out the edges, balancing and shifting like those of a discus thrower. His casual sauntering step transformed seamlessly into the honed-steel speed of a fighter. The way he moved—she had never forgotten that deadly grace. He was the very figure of her nightmares these eleven years, and her throat tightened in panicked visceral memory of pain.

Before she could even follow his gaze to his targets or make any attempt to interpose her body between them, Spencer had launched the platters with vicious accuracy at two newcomers.

Crockery smashed, knife-like shards flew, and the burning contents splattered on his victims. Their screams tore through the Brew Pub, and all hell broke loose.

Martha simply evaporated. She didn't go anywhere; she was just gone. Ezekiel surreptitiously disappeared under the table. Cassandra, ever hopelessly valiant, armed herself with her butter knife and fork, looking belligerent. Chairs toppled and scattered as Stone leapt to his feet and whirled to join the fray.

Colin dived to prevent Eve launching herself at Spencer. It took Eve less than a minute to shed herself of his inexpert hold, but that minute gave her time to process the fact that the two men Spencer had attacked were dressed in black and had balaclavas covering their faces. Also, they were accompanied by another eight men dressed the same and armed with knives.

Spencer had already engaged four of them, while Jake was struggling with two. The difference between the cousins was now thoroughly apparent. Jake's assailants sent him flying over the bar. Spencer, on the other hand, hadn't even been knocked back.

His style was viciously fast, in close and brutal, deadly—the perfect example of how to let an enemy give you the victory. The few strikes they managed to land, he turned to his advantage, letting them propel his next attack, and not many of their blows got by his blocks that were ferocious enough to crack bone, Men went down before him like rag dolls. In the time it took Eve to change trajectory and single out her own opponents, Spencer had taken out six of the ten and was slamming the heads of the two that had gone after his cousin into the countertop of the bar.

Eve realized she was seeing exactly how he could have vanquished her entire team, even though they had been armed and armored.

The thud of her own fist into the solar plexus of one enemy and the crack of her head against the face of the other filled her with a fierce satisfaction. She had been wanting to hit something all evening.

The battle was over too quickly. Eve found herself standing over the unconscious bodies of her opponents, staring at a room that was in shambles. The few remaining patrons had scattered behind tables and were emerging, most of them acting like this was something to be expected when one ate at the Brew Pub. A few were checking their phones and exchanging cash like they'd been placing bets on the outcome—as if they were spectators at a hockey game who'd been lucky enough to see a fight break out. Just how frequently did Spencer throw down with attackers in his restaurant?

Eve turned to take inventory of her charges. Ezekiel's sheepish face appeared over the top of the table. Cassandra was standing, being prevented from joining the fray by Colin, for which Eve was grateful. Her eyes and mouth were completely round, as she watched Spencer hauling his last two opponents, who had to be approaching 200 pounds apiece, one in each hand by the scruffs of their necks, and tossing them onto the pile of his other victims.

"Zip ties," he called.

"What? Oh, sure," Colin responded, as though those were a staple product for a restaurant. "Gotcha."

He hadn't killed them. He so easily could have. It was manifestly self defense. They had been armed, and he was not. Of course, that sort of body count would bring an unnecessary amount of legal attention.

Spencer brushed his hair out of his face with his hands and glanced at Eve, standing over her own conquests. His unselfconscious grin of camaraderie did not give her the least urge to return it.

"Good work," he told her.

Eve realized that Stone was still invisible behind the bar. For him to stay out of a fight was out of character. Worried, she took a step, intending to investigate.

A familiar voice halted her.

"Hello, cowboy. I like what you've done with your hair."

* * *

><p>TBC<p> 


	11. Chapter 11

Title: By Paths Coincident 11/?

Author: Honorat

Rating: T

Characters: Jenkins, Eve Baird, Jacob Stone, Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, Parker, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Damien Moreau, Chapman, Lamia, Others TBA as needed.

Pairing: Parker/Hardison, Cassandra/Jake, Cassandra/Eliot, just a touch of Eliot/OC

Disclaimer: Dean Devlin, John Rogers, TNT own these characters.

Description: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren't the only members of the two teams who've met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark.

Notes: Fights and H/C

By Paths Coincident

* * *

><p>Lamia drifted into the lit room as though she were made of the shadows out of which she stepped. Her serpent tattoo seemed to writhe upon her arm.<p>

While Lamia carried only her katana strapped to her back, the three henchmen flanking her spread out to cover the room with semi-automatics. The Serpent Brotherhood was stepping up its game. Everyone in the room ceased moving. Eve took one step forward, but as the cold muzzle of a pistol targeted her, she froze.

Lamia ignored the Guardian, her focus on Eliot Spencer. Eve realized that the assassin had no idea that the man who leaned nonchalantly against a table, his arms folded and one leg crossed over the other, an appreciative smile on his face, was not Jacob Stone, and she had to resist the incongruous urge to laugh.

Spencer looked Lamia up and down in the most insulting manner possible, tilted his head in a sideways nod, and said, "The Serpent Brotherhood. It's been awhile. My compliments to the recruiters."

Wait just one damn minute. How did Spencer know about Dulaque's cult? Was it possible by any stretch of the imagination that Lamia was expecting Spencer instead of Stone?

"So, cowboy." Lamia's voice was a caress. "Are you going to come with me without a fight?"

"Darlin', you know I never go anywhere without a fight." Spencer straightened up, still not obviously prepared to attack her, but no longer relaxed. "As temptin' as you make that offer, I'm afraid I'm gonna have to decline."

Eliot Spencer had the reputation to back up the utter confidence in his voice, but Eve could not imagine how an unarmed man, even one such as he, could hope to best a swordswoman of Lamia's caliber when he had no element of surprise on his side. Whatever victory he hoped to gain, he must surely know the price would be paid in blood.

The ceiling above the man who had his gun trained on Eve rattled, drawing everyone's eyes. Eve seized the opportunity and dropped, rolling for cover, and incidentally, giving herself a better location from which to attack the second gunman.

As the first gunman took aim at the grating, it broke loose, hitting him on the head and knocking him to the ground. In the opening above him appeared a blond ponytail followed by the demented upside down smile of Martha.

"Eliot! Sword!" she called, as she thrust a scabbard through the vent.

Spencer did not glance her direction, but he caught the weapon over his shoulder when she threw it to him.

Martha disappeared up the vent, then swung down feet first like a gymnast on parallel bars, driving her boots directly into the face of Lamia's henchman as he was staggering to his feet. Dropping first to the table top, she leapt to the floor and finished her man with a stomp to his head.

Whirling around, Martha pulled a Taser off her belt, flourishing it with a shrill war cry. The Taser accounted for the third gunman.

Eve used the distraction to launch herself at the man she was stalking. For a moment they wrestled for control of his weapon, but the heel of her hand, striking his jaw with all of her force knocked his head back and allowed her to throw him to the ground. The pistol skittered across the floor.

She had her opponent face down, his arms pinned and her knee in his back when she found a dark hand holding something out to her.

"Zip tie?" Colin asked, as though offering her sugar with her tea.

Who were these crazy people Spencer worked with? Nevertheless, Eve took the strip of plastic and secured her captive. Then, just to be sure he did not get up and interfere again, she coldcocked him. That was cathartic.

The only two combatants remaining were Spencer and Lamia.

Eve was struck by the change in Spencer. His movements were calm, elegant now instead of brutally efficient. The motion of palm and thumb with which he slipped the scabbard off the blade of the katana was formal and precise and had the air of ritual.

Lamia raised an eyebrow and tilted her head. Eve realized that Lamia had never seen Stone fight with a blade, so she might be unsure of his expertise—the rawest of beginners, actually, Eve knew. However, if Lamia were here for Spencer, she must know what she would be up against.

They faced each other, poised for an instant of perfect serenity. Then, as though responding to the same unheard signal, they exploded into a whirlwind of cuts and parries more rapid than thought. The Brew Pub rang with the ancient clash of swords.

Eve watched in awe as Lamia and Spencer wove lightning-flash arcs of steel through footwork that seemed more ballet than battle, the two of them incarnations of beauty and power. If Lamia was all swirling smoke, Spencer was crackling flame. Together they burned the heart.

Just when it seemed the two warriors might circle forever, caught in the intimate and deadly dance of swords, Spencer locked his hilt with Lamia's guard, switched to a single handed grip, and rotated his wrist, pushing his katana's hilt between Lamia's hands. Seizing her forearm with his free hand, he used the leverage of his sword to force her down.

The move was as smooth as the slide of silk, swift and fatal as the stoop of a falcon. It ended with Lamia lying on the floor, her katana immobilized, looking up into Spencer eyes as he crouched over her with his blade across her throat.

"Finish it if you're going to," Lamia snarled.

"Why would I wanna do a thing like that, darlin'?" Spencer smiled at her. "Now just hand me that lovely blade of yours, and we'll call it even."

If glares could have ignited flesh, Spencer would have been reduced to ash. Lamia resisted for a moment as he took hold of the hilt of her katana, but the slight tensing of her muscles opened a hair-fine red line on her neck, and she subsided.

Martha bounded up to Spencer. "Want me to tase her?" she asked brightly.

Spencer scowled at her then looked thoughtful. Then he shrugged and nodded.

With entirely too much relish the young woman bent over.

"No! Wait . . ." Lamia tried to object.

But Martha just grinned and zapped her. "Nighty night!"

With Lamia no longer a threat, Eve bolted for the bar.

"Stone! Jacob! Are you all right? Jacob!"

"Oh! Oh no! Jake!" Cassandra slipped away from Colin, whose job beyond dispensing zip ties appeared to be keeping the non-combatants non-combatant, and rushed after her.

Stone lay where he had been thrown by the two Serpent Brotherhood thugs. He was stirring, but there was blood on the floor under his head.

Before Eve could make it around the end of the bar, Spencer had vaulted over the top of it.

"Dammit, Jake!"

He knelt beside his cousin, hands holding him down. "Don't move y'daft fool."

"'M fine," Stone insisted blearily. "You know my head is harder than whatever I hit."

"I know you never had the sense God gave an onion," Spencer complained, relief mixed with the anger in his voice. "Couldn't ever resist jumpin' into a brawl that was none of your business."

"Onions," Stone said, "are very sensitive . . . sensible . . . fruits . . . vegetables . . . um, things with roots that grow . . . whatever . . ." he trailed off.

Spencer's eyes met Eve's as she dropped to her knees on the other side of Stone, and she thought that if those had been Jacob Stone's eyes she would have interpreted the emotion in them as guilt.

"Here, let me see that," Spencer's voice was rough, but his hands were gentle as he examined Stone's injury. "That's a pretty deep cut you got there."

"Head wounds just bleed a lot," Stone protested, his voice clearer. "Is all this fuss really necessary?"

He tried to sit up again, but Spencer kept him pinned. "Miss Cillian, would you be willing to hold this idiot's head? I'm sure if he's lyin' in the lap of a beautiful woman, he'll stay put."

Stone tried a glare at his cousin and then winced.

"Do as you're told, Stone," Eve added her authority. "You're lucky you don't have a cervical injury."

"Yes, ma'am," Stone said.

"Oh, you'll listen to her?"

"Wouldn't you?" Stone asked. "She can kick my ass."

"I'll tell you who can kick your ass," Spencer growled, as he carefully supported Stone's head while Cassandra slid under him.

"Hey," she said, giving Stone a tremulous smile.

"Hey, Cassie." Stone smiled up at her. "Sorry for spoilin' your dress."

"It's okay," Cassandra said. "Really, it is."

Eve had to grant that Spencer knew what he was doing. Stone stopped trying to hop up and shake it off and submitted to being fussed over.

"Where's the . . . ? Oh, there it is." Spencer said as the bartender trundled up with the first aid kit, one that looked extraordinarily large and well-stocked.

"Thank you Asfar," Spencer said, opening the top compartment and pulling out a packet of sterile dressings. Opening it without touching the contents, he applied it to the bloody mess on the side of Stone's head. "Cassandra, if you could keep some pressure on that cut, slow the bleeding?"

"Oh, yes." Cassandra said, startled but game, taking over holding the dressing.

Fishing in one of the first aid kit pockets, Spencer pulled out a penlight. "Just going to check your eyes," he informed Stone. "And stop rolling them."

Eve supposed a man with Spencer's resume would practically have a paramedic's experience.

As Spencer checked the responsiveness of his cousin's pupils, Eve began the standard cognitive questions for the victim of a head injury.

"What year is it, Stone?" she asked.

Spencer snorted. "You can't check a brain like his with a question like that—Jake, what year did that Danish guy transcribe Cotton Nero A Fifteen?"

"You people are becomin' annoying," Stone growled. "For your diagnostic information it is Monday, March 2, 2015. And you're tryin' t' be smart, Eliot. Grimur Jónsson Thorkelin transcribed Cotton MS _Vitellius_ , not Nero. To answer your question there is some discrepancy in the dates because Thorkelin claimed he began work on the manuscript in 1787, but personal letters recently found at the Rigsarkivet and the Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen indicate his copy was actually made somewhere between 1789 and 1791."

He seemed prepared to go on indefinitely on the topic, but Spencer interrupted. "Okay, okay. Stop! You're within your normal parameters of insanity."

Cassandra gave a little sniffle and smiled with relief, her free hand involuntarily barely brushing at Stone's hair. Their obstinate art historian melted a little bit, and Spencer eyed them with a funny half-smile like he had confirmed a theory.

"Now, visual acuity," he said briskly. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

"W," said Stone.

"What?" Eve asked, worried because the answer should have been three.

"It's sign language," Spencer explained. "Useful for talking in class right in front of the teacher. All right, Jake, the blocks in your head still seem to be stacked. Let's sit you up so I can take a better look at that wound. You'll have to keep the pressure on it yourself."

Stone's hand briefly covered Cassandra's as he took over holding the dressing. She slipped her bloodied fingertips out from under his, folding them into her other hand and twisting them nervously as Eve and Spencer helped him sit up

"Not so fast!" Eve warned Stone. "Slowly."

"Owww!" Stone complained. "Damn, have I got the mother lode of all headaches."

"I bet you do," Eve said, sliding her shoulder under his arm. "Easy there, cowboy."

Together she and Spencer assisted Stone upright. Cassandra scrambled to her feet and continued to hover. Her skirt was now rather unsettlingly bloody.

Eve was relieved to find Ezekiel leaned up against the bar, feigning unconcern, and as usual, completely unscathed and full of snark.

"Nice little number you did on that cupboard door, Stone," he said. "I don't think it's going to be threatening anyone else for a long time."

It said something about how Stone was feeling that he paid no attention to his pestiferous colleague. Eve glared at Ezekiel and made throat cutting signs with her free hand. The thief subsided reluctantly, self-preservation being one of his primary talents.

Spencer directed his cousin to a chair in good lighting, and Stone collapsed into it with a pained grimace.

Martha appeared in front of him. Eve was beginning to find the young woman's uncanny materializations a bit unnerving. "Water!" she held up a glass. "Tylenol!" Her palm cupped two small pills.

"Has anyone ever told you you're a goddess?" Stone asked, taking the glass in one hand and letting her tip the pills into his other. He swallowed the pills with one gulp.

"Yes," Martha said cheerfully. "H-Colin tells me that all the time when I . . ."

"Martha!" Spencer snapped.

Stone looked like he might choke. Ezekiel looked fascinated. Cassandra looked like she was simply waiting for the sentence to finish and did not understand the problem.

"Oh!" Martha said as though recalling something she had forgotten. "I'll just go clean up all that blood."

"You do that." Spencer shook his head.

Martha trotted off as if dealing with blood were an everyday occupation.

Eve could see that Colin was encouraging the departure of the rest of the Brew Pub clientele. "Everything's on the house tonight, folks. Sorry for the extra drama. Pick up your coupons for 20 % off on your next visit at the front desk."

These people had a system for placating customers whose meals were interrupted by violence? Once again, Eve found herself wondering just what kind of mayhem was a regular occurrence here. Certainly no one seemed to be paying any attention to the pile of bound minions of the Serpent Brotherhood. She realized she was actually hearing sirens getting closer. Apparently someone had had the good sense to call the police.

In the next moment, the door to the Brew Pub flew open and four officers with guns drawn burst in. "Portland P.D.! Nobody move!"

"Olivia! Jack!" Martha exclaimed, delighted. "I'm glad it's you! Thanks for coming so fast." She waved her hand around, the gesture encompassing all the unconscious or incapacitated bodies. "The ones in the zip ties are the bad guys. Everybody else is good guys."

The officers relaxed their weapons, apparently completely familiar with the Brew Pub and its personnel. "What happened here?" asked the officer Martha had identified as Olivia.

Slipping her ID out of her pocket, Eve held it out. "Colonel Eve Baird, NATO Counter-terrorism," she identified herself to the officers. She nodded in the direction of the captives. "Those are the people responsible—they came in armed with knives and three guns. We were able to subdue them, but I've got one man injured."

The officer Martha had identified as Olivia quickly checked Eve's ID. "I'll have Officer Bailey take statements, and the rest of us can make the arrests. Are we going to need EMS?"

"Eliot usually damages people a bit, so you might," Martha shrugged.

"All right, we can take care of that," the woman said. "You people never leave us much to do except clean up." She turned and stalked off, talking into her radio.

Apparently, Spencer was operating on the right side of the law so far in Portland. Certainly, the local LEOs appeared on familiar and congenial terms with the Brew Pub crew. Eve had to admit it was going to be amusing to see Dulaque's crack team of assassins behind bars for armed robbery. At least they were no longer her responsibility.

Eve turned back to the group clustered around Stone.

"Shouldn't we be getting him to a doctor?" Ezekiel asked. "Not that I care or anything, but Stone's brain is the only useful part of him."

The Brew Pub crew looked nonplussed, as though they had forgotten such options existed. Eve herself was so accustomed to patching up hard-headed and hard-drinking recruits that she hadn't really considered whether the ER was the place for Stone.

Spencer contemplated his cousin. "You're gonna need a few stitches to hold that gash closed," he told Stone. "Now I can put 'em in for you, or your friends here can take you to the hospital. It's your choice."

"Not a fan of hospitals," Stone admitted. "And I doubt you've forgotten how. You do it."

"All right then."

Spencer set Colin and Ezekiel to pulling up a table where he could lay out a tray with instruments and supplies. Once again, Eve noted that the Brew Pub first aid kit was more like an emergency first response kit. Spencer had all the materials to perform minor surgery should he so choose.

On the tray, wrapped in sterile bubble packs, were syringes, hair-fine curved needles, suture thread, a vial of local anaesthetic, gauze pads, antiseptic wipes, and surgical scissors. A large bottle of betadyne disinfectant sat next to a box of nitrile gloves.

In spite of her theory about Spencer's proficiency in field medicine, Eve was impressed with his technique. He immediately assumed she would be the logical choice for nurse, and invited her to join him in scrubbing up and donning surgical gloves.

"If you could wipe as much of that blood as possible out of his hair," Spencer told her, setting out a basin of warm water and a stack of clean restaurant linens, "I can shave the hair away from the edges of that cut."

"Can I see your licenses as cosmetologists?" Stone complained.

"Come on, Stone. Your manly vanity will survive our amateur hairdressing," Eve said, dipping a cloth in the water and wringing it out. "I'm going to have to remove that dressing you're holding," she warned him. "Hold still."

The blood drying and matting in his hair had already adhered to the dressing, so Eve had to work it loose. She was careful, but as she gently detached the gauze from the site of the injury, she saw Stone's hands clench on the sides of the chair and his knuckles go white. He didn't move, however.

"There," she said, dropping the gory mess on the table top, hoping that someone at the Brew Pub planned to thoroughly sanitize the place before resuming regular service. The jagged tear Stone had received courtesy of the cupboard door handle still oozed blood sluggishly.

Because she did not want to introduce any more bacteria into the cut than was already there, she avoided getting water too close to the injury, but Stone wasn't going to be able to wash his hair for a couple of days, so she did her best to reduce the amount of blood that had soaked that side of his head as he had lain in it.

Cassandra stood by, washed and gloved of her own initiative, a little dewy-eyed, but gamely handing Eve cloths as she needed them. The pile of crimson cloths grew on the table, and the water in the basin went from pink to red.

When Spencer's hands appeared beside hers ready to trim the hair from around the cut, Eve shied away, her mind flashing back to an image of black rather than blue gloves, and a blood-stained knife rather than shiny, sterile scissors. She noticed Stone's eyes on her and forced her breathing back to normal, trying to make her retreat less obvious.

"Two by two, hands of blue," Ezekiel commented. "Stone, you'd better make sure your cousin isn't working for the Alliance."

"I'm not at liberty to tell you that," Spencer commented absently as he daubed the area around the wound with generous amounts of betadyne. Apparently he was used to that level of geekery from his association with Colin.

Snips of Stone's thick dark hair fell to his shoulders and the floor.

"Sorry about the premature baldness." Spencer's tone was mocking rather than apologetic as he switched to the razor. Nevertheless, Eve noted that he was careful to clear as little hair around the cut as possible, and that Stone would be able to hide most of the resultant gap with artful combing.

Although his cousin was obviously trying not to hurt him, Stone closed his eyes and his breath hissed through his teeth.

Cassandra winced in sympathy. "Are you okay?" she asked, touching Stone on the shoulder.

He did not open his eyes or answer her but reached up and gripped her hand. Cassandra's eyes widened then softened into a tender, maternal sort of look as she let him hold her hand.

Eve backed away to keep the area less congested. If it got her further away from Spencer, that was all to the good.

"Jones, why don't you lift Stone's keys and go get the pickup, so we don't have to walk to it," she suggested. "We shouldn't have any trouble parking in front of the Brew Pub now."

"Aye aye, Colonel Baird!" He slipped in beside Spencer, and had the keys out of Stone's pocket without either of them paying him any attention. Giving Eve a cheeky grin, Ezekiel, hurried off to do as he was bid.

Having finished his work as barber, Spencer picked up a syringe that he must have filled while Eve was cleaning Stone's hair.

"I'm going to numb the area now," he told Stone. "You'll feel a couple of pokes, but everything should improve after that."

"Numb is good," Stone said.

As Spencer prepared to inject the first amount of local anaesthetic, he asked, "Remember the first time I ever stitched up a cut?"

Stone laughed. "We were what? Twelve?"

"Something like that," Spencer said, completing the injections with practiced speed and ease. He'd obviously done this before-frequently. "We were skipping school."

"You were a bad influence," Stone commented.

Spencer shrugged. "Your childhood would have been a trackless expanse of boredom without me."

"We were also trespassing," Stone said, relaxing as the numbing agent took hold.

Self-consciously, he dropped Cassandra's hand. Cassandra blushed and withdrew her hand from his shoulder.

Spencer picked up the tiny needle already threaded with suture material. Using a sterile sponge, he dabbed the blood away from the wound so that he could see to stitch. Holding the torn flesh together, he inserted the needle and drew it through both ragged edges, joining them firmly. With a flourish, he tied a knot in the first stitch. "You have to admit the old Bowett place was a great place to play World War II!"

"And t'try to kill ourselves." Stone frowned.

"There was that." Spencer sponged away the blood again and set the next stitch.

"They shoulda known better than to tell us never t'go there. Like that was gonna work!"

"Parents. They never learn." Spencer looked off into the distance briefly, tossing his hair from his eyes.

"Eliot was the Germans, and I was the Allies," Stone explained to Cassandra and Eve. "The Bowett place was an abandoned 19th century farm house. The doors and ground floor windows were boarded up, but that didn't stop us from clamberin' onto the roof and riskin' our necks breakin' into a second story window. Man, that was fun!"

"Well, it was until I stepped through some rotten floorboards and ripped up my leg on the nails," Spencer said dryly.

"Don't you mean until you were bayoneted and captured?" Stone smirked.

"Right. So you got to practice your skills as a medic and ruin my shirt nearly cutting off my leg with a tourniquet." Spencer glared at him.

"Then I hauled my prisoner of war back to the POW camp aka Uncle Saul's place. But there was no way we were gonna admit what we'd done. So we used Uncle Saul's fish line and Aunt Bernice's embroidery needles to sew up Eliot's leg."

"What's this 'we'?" Spencer asked, delicately tying off another knot. "You were too squeamish to stick a needle into me. I had to sew up my own leg."

"Hey, I knew my limitations," Stone said. "But you have to admit I did a bang-up job of bandagin'."

"Yeah. With Aunt B's scarf! Was she ever hoppin' mad when she finally got it back." Spencer took another stitch.

You were lucky you didn't lose that leg," Stone said. "Sepsis or gangrene or something. It's not like we were particularly sterile."

"Fortunately, my tetanus shots were up to date," Spencer agreed. "Then you had the bright idea to pour rubbing alcohol over it."

Stone chuckled. "And after I peeled you off the ceiling . . ."

"That hurt like hell," Spencer said. "For a long time that was my measure for how bad something could get. Flaming bamboo strips under my fingernails? Piece of cake. Nothing like that rubbing alcohol."

Stone eyed his cousin as if he were almost sure he was joking. Eve was pretty sure he was not.

"Did your families ever find out what you'd done?" Cassandra asked.

"No," Stone shook his head. "Eliot limped around for a few days, but that wasn't so unusual, and nobody asked."

"I still have a really odd looking scar." Spencer tied off the last in his series of precise, tiny sutures.

"Wow! I couldn't have a hangnail without a family emergency meeting," Cassandra commented. "If I'd ever showed up limping there would have been specialists involved."

"And there you are." Spencer set down the needle and thread. "All stitched up. You look like Frankenstein's monster now."

"Creature," Stone corrected. "Frankenstein's creature. He wasn't really a monster. In fact he was an innocent until human society taught him cruelty and drove him to kill."

"He may not have begun life as a monster, but he chose to become one," Spencer said quietly. "That's not a choice you can unmake."

Stone looked searchingly at his cousin, but Spencer did not meet his eyes. Instead, he busied himself peeling off his blood-stained blue gloves.

Eve saw again black gloves with fingertips glistening crimson—with Torbjørn's blood, with Teresinha's, with Poptart's, with her own. The hands of a monster.

Those hands remained deceptively gentle as they applied sterile pads to the wound on Stone's head.

"You know the drill—any nausea, dizziness, persistent headaches, confusion—and it's off to the ER for you." Spencer taped the bandage in place.

"Yes, doctor" Stone said with deceptive humility.

"And no washing your hair for 48 hours. You can get Colonel Baird to remove the stitches in 3 to 5 days," Spencer said.

Eve nodded at him. "We'd better get you home and lying down, Stone," she said.

Martha trotted over, bearing an icepack that Stone accepted with gratitude. At least this time Eve had seen her arriving.

"Can someone stay with him overnight?" Spencer asked. "Make sure there's no damage we're missing?"

"Certainly," Eve said. "We'll take care of him."

Their departure was delayed by the necessity of providing their contact information to Portland PD. Ezekiel arrived back from bringing the pickup and lied to the police about every circumstance of his existence. Eve was too tired to care. The Library probably did not want him arrested anyway.

The police did not need long statements from them because it turned out that Colin had provided them with surveillance video from every possible angle. Apparently the Brew Pub was an impossible place to attempt anything clandestine.

Finally, they were ready to go. The Brew Pub crew shook hands with the Librarian team. Cassandra added an impulsive hug for Spencer.

"Thank you," she said. "I had a lovely time—well—before everything else."

"You're welcome for the lovely time part," Spencer said. "I'm sorry the dessert ended up all over the floor and the goons. And I'm sorry for the excessive infestation of goons."

Cassandra giggled. "But it was pretty spectacular."

Spencer's smile at her was wistful.

Stone looked pale and exhausted; however, he stood on his own and refused to lean on anyone. He shook hands with Colin and Martha and turned to bid his cousin farewell.

"Eliot, your food was terrific, but the floor show left a lot to be desired," he joked, holding out his hand.

"Maybe next time, you'll remember to stay put when you haven't been invited to join in and let the professionals do their jobs." Spencer's tone was dead serious.

Stone ignored the reproof and clasped Spencer's hand. "I'm so glad we ran into each other. Let's do it again before another twenty years pass."

In response, Spencer pulled him into a fierce hug. Stone looked startled, given his cousin's first reaction to being hugged, but then pleased.

"It was good to see you, Jake," Spencer said into his cousin's neck. "Felt just a bit like goin' home."

As Spencer released him and stepped back, Stone looked as if he would have liked to ask his cousin a thousand questions, none of which he could ask.

"See you later, then?" Stone asked hopefully.

The look in Spencer's eyes was that of a soldier saying good-bye on the docks before shipping out for a tour of duty from which he did not expect to return. "Take care of yourself," he responded, clapping Stone on the shoulder a last time.

* * *

><p>As they exited the Brew Pub, Eve wondered if anyone had noticed that she and Spencer had exchanged no farewells. She felt a small elation that she'd extricated this team alive and mostly in one piece.<p>

Cassandra followed at Stone's shoulder, their usual positions reversed, ready to support him should he falter. Surprisingly, Ezekiel was hovering a bit, too. Their thief would have to watch himself, or he would start losing his impervious detachment.

They threaded their way through the last of the police cars loaded with Lamia's crew. Two ambulances were just pulling away with Spencer's more unlucky victims.

Stone gave a sigh of relief when they reached his pickup. He didn't even complain when Eve chivalrously assisted him with climbing in. This time Jones and Cassandra had the back seat, since Eve planned to drive so she could drop the others off before taking Stone home.

As Eve finished settling Stone in the front passenger seat, Martha appeared at her shoulder. Eve started. Once again, she had not realized the woman had followed her.

"I'm supposed to give these back to you," Martha said, handing Eve a sealed plastic bag containing her missing ammunition.

Eve watched as Martha hurried through the rain and saw Eliot Spencer, standing shadowed in the entrance to the Brew Pub.

Quickly and automatically drawing her weapon, Eve inserted the magazine and chambered a round. For the first time that evening, she held a loaded gun.

In those seconds, however, Martha and Spencer had disappeared into the Brew Pub.

A chill slithered up Eve's spine. The temporary truce was over.

* * *

><p>TBC<p>

Notes: In case you didn't recognize their cameo appearances here, the Portland PD officers Olivia and Jack were the law enforcement officers Parker and Amy set up to for a date at The Brew Pub in The Broken Wing Job.


	12. Chapter 12

Title: By Paths Coincident 12/?

Author: Honorat

Rating: T

Characters: Jenkins, Eve Baird, Jacob Stone, Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, Parker, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Damien Moreau, Chapman, Lamia, Others TBA as needed.

Pairing: Parker/Hardison, Cassandra/Jake, Cassandra/Eliot, just a touch of Eliot/OC

Disclaimer: Dean Devlin, John Rogers, TNT own these characters.

Description: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren't the only members of the two teams who've met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark.

By Paths Coincident

* * *

><p>Eve took several deep breaths to calm the battle nerves that in the absence of discharge were making her feel as if her skin contained broken power lines, snapping and arcing. Not taking her eyes off the Brew Pub, she slowly holstered her pistol and backed up to where she could open the door of the pickup and step into the driver's seat.<p>

She did not relax until they were several blocks away.

In the rear view mirror, she could see Ezekiel's face lit by the screen of his phone. Cassandra leaned sleepily against the side of the truck, the day obviously overtaking her. Beside her, Stone sat straight, staring into the night, the bandage on the side of his head standing out light over dark. Eve let herself gloat over them a little—her team, alive and mostly well. Safe, for the time being, from assassins and cults.

She would drop Ezekiel off first. Since his illegal activity significantly supplemented his income as a Librarian in Training, he had his own townhouse apartment in an upscale neighbourhood closer to the heart of Portland. Eve had no doubt the crime rate in the area was on the rise.

Cassandra and Eve had chosen economical apartments in the same building within walking distance of The Annex, so when they dropped Cassandra off, Eve would be able to dash in and grab her bag she kept packed for longer missions.

Stone had rejected conventional apartments and had found a room to rent on the top floor of an actual house.

When she informed her team of her proposed plan to spend the night with Stone, he objected, "I'll be fine. If anything goes wrong, I can call my landlady."

"If you are able to call her," Eve said, "you don't need her. Listen, you need someone to stay with you, wake you up occasionally, make sure you're okay. Jones would irritate you to death."

"And there is no way I'm babysitting you," Ezekiel chimed in.

"And Colonel Baird has the most experience in dealing with injuries," Cassandra put in.

"So, you don't have to like it, but I promised someone would spend the night with you, and I intend to keep that promise," Eve finished.

Stone was looking mulish, but the effort of arguing appeared to be beyond his capacity at the moment, for which Eve was grateful.

"That's settled then," Eve said. "I'll just pick up my overnight bag when we drop off Cassandra."

Stone's only resigned comment was "How am I gonna explain you to my landlady?"

Jones laughed. "It's the 21st century. You're a man. She's a woman. What's to explain?"

Stone pinched the bridge of his nose and grimaced in more than physical pain.

"I am going to strangle you, Ezekiel Jones," Eve said through gritted teeth. "Life imprisonment would be worth it. But no jury in the land would convict."

Ezekiel prudently subsided into his phone again. Several more blocks went by in blessed silence before an exclamation from the back seat startled all of them.

"No! I don't believe it! I do not believe this!"

Cassandra, yanked back from the gates of sleep, popped upright, exclaiming "What? What is it?"

"Do you know who those people were?" Ezekiel asked, waving his phone around. The light bounced around the cab, annoying Eve and making Stone wince.

"Which ones?" Cassandra asked.

"Those friends of Stone's cousin!" he said.

"Colin and Martha?"

"Exactly," Ezekiel said significantly.

"What do you mean?" Cassandra sounded bewildered.

"Those names—Colin Hartnell and Martha Tyler—they're made up from the names of actors and characters on _Doctor Who_. They're aliases. I've just been running face rec on them."

"Wait," Stone interrupted irritably. "So they're lying about who they are?"

"Oh yeah. Are they ever, and no wonder!" Ezekiel sounded like—well, like Cassandra high on Christmas. "They're really Alec Hardison and Parker!"

The cab of the truck was filled with an unimpressed and unenlightened silence.

"Alec Hardison," Ezekiel repeated. "How can you people be so smart about things you can't see or that happened in the Bronze Age and have absolutely no clue about the real world? Alec Hardison is only the best hacker ever! He's been my role model my whole life. I mean, he hacked the Pentagon when he was twelve years old! I didn't manage that until I was seventeen—um, allegedly."

Eve could feel him eying the back of her head. "Is that a confession, Jones?"

"Not at all, Colonel Baird."

"What about the other one," Cassandra asked. "Parker who?"

"It's just Parker." Ezekiel's enthusiasm revved up again. "She's like the queen of thieves. No one has ever caught her. They say she could steal the glasses off the face of the Pope without anyone noticing."

"I guess that explains how someone could have pickpocketed my gun and replaced it unloaded," Eve mused.

"Parker lifted your gun? That is so awesome! There isn't anything she can't break into or out of. She's beaten a Steranko—twice!"

"A Steranko," Eve said dubiously. She was aware that Steranko security systems were considered unbeatable.

"I know, right?" Ezekiel gushed—there was really no other word to describe it. "Did you see her take out those Serpent Brotherhood thugs?"

"So, hands of the world's best thief, and she does do punchy, hmmm?" Stone asked.

"Hey, Parker is insane. I am not." Ezekiel defended his pacifism. "One time, after a heist, she BASE jumped from the top of the tallest building in Dubai to escape. That's 828 metres! Oh. My. God. I cannot believe I've met Hardison and Parker!"

Cassandra was holding giggles in her mouth with her fingertips, and even Stone had a twist of half a smile in the corner of his mouth. They had never seen Ezekiel Jones humble for even an instant, so this hero worship was particularly amusing.

"You're totally geeking out again." Cassandra said, her voice shining with laughter.

Ezekiel shrugged.

"So, what I'm wondering is what are the world's greatest thief and hacker doing running a brew pub in Portland, Oregon—particularly working with the world's greatest—or worst, depending on your point of view—hitter, retrieval specialist, and general killer for hire, Eliot Spencer."

"What?" Stone twisted around in his seat to glare at Ezekiel. "What are you talking about?"

Oh, hell. This was not how Eve had wanted Jacob Stone to learn about his cousin's other profession.

"Jones," she warned. "This is not the time."

"No," Stone said firmly. "I think it is. Explain."

Taking Stone as the person who mattered, Ezekiel ignored Eve. "Okay, your cousin is a seriously bad dude. On a scale of one to ten of fucking scary, he's like 18."

"Oh." Cassandra gave a little gasp. "Oh, no."

"Jones." Eve let some menace slip into her voice, but the irrepressible Ezekiel babbled on, his agile fingers flipping through information on his phone.

"I am not kidding you. The guy is a legend. He's toppled governments! Word is, if Eliot Spencer comes for you, his is the last face you'll ever see. He's got a body count that looks like a phone number."

"Jones, be quiet."

"No, let him talk. I want to hear this." Stone's voice was chilled and soft.

"So I thought well, maybe it's a different guy," Ezekiel continued, "but no. THE Eliot Spencer was last known to be in Boston as part of Nathan Ford's crew—they pulled some of the biggest jobs this side of the Atlantic in the last decade. And here's the kicker. Two of the other members of Ford's crew were Alec Hardison and Parker."

"Ezekiel Jones, if you don't shut up . . ." Eve's teeth were gritted now. Jones possessed the ability to fray every last nerve belonging to every person within the range of his voice.

Their thief was still poking away at his phone. "Hey, did you know there's a price on Spencer's head—he's wanted dead or alive in Myanmar for a cool 500,000 US dollars."

"Don't even think about it," Eve growled at him.

"No way!" he shook his head vehemently. "I've better ways to score a half million. Ones that involve my surviving to enjoy it."

"So why hasn't someone collected it?" Stone asked.

Eve winced.

"Self-preservation. I told you," Ezekiel said. "Eliot Spencer is the best. You don't hit him unless you want to be very, very dead, or at least wishing you were. Did you see him in The Brew Pub? Oh, right, you were knocked out by the cupboard door. He took out eight of those Serpent Brotherhood assassins while Colonel Baird was dealing with two—without breaking a sweat."

Stone was so very still now. Eve risked a glance at him in the flickering glare of the passing street lights, and the expression on his face made her heart hurt for him.

"Jones, someday, somebody is going to shoot you in the face, and you'll still be asking 'What did I say?'" she said.

"What did I say?" Ezekiel remained oblivious to the effect his words were having on Stone. "Hey, Colonel Baird, when did you meet up with Spencer? You get along better with Dulaque than with him! Must have been some kind of a show down!"

"Okay, that's it. The next person who says a word on this ride is walking home. And Jones, you'll be lucky if I stop the truck so you can get out." Eve clenched the steering wheel until her knuckles shone white in the glow of the dash and fought not to remember.

She did not succeed.

By the time, she had dropped Ezekiel and Cassandra off at their respective lodgings, Eve was scarcely holding on to her composure. She wished she had no responsibilities and could return to the Annex and its gym or salle d'armes or whatever Jenkins wanted to call it, where she could exercise herself into oblivion. She really needed something to punch.

Returning to the pickup after her quick visit to her apartment, Eve climbed in and tossed her bag into the back seat.

Stone looked over at her briefly. "Do you need directions?"

As his Guardian, Eve knew the address where Stone boarded, but she had never been there. Since his truck was usually the transport when they traveled as a team without the use of the back door, he would drop each of them at their apartments and continue on alone.

"I've got GPS." She waved her phone at him. He nodded and leaned back against the seat, closing his eyes.

For some time, the only sounds in the car other than those of the engine and the windshield wipers was the quiet, polite voice of the GPS telling Eve where to turn, and finally, when they had arrived.

The neighborhood was older—tall trees, smaller houses set back from the sidewalks on lots that sloped up. Not a prosperous part of town. Eve parked the truck along the street beside a battered mailbox with the number Stone had given her glinting on its side. She turned to look at him, to ask if this was the right place, but his eyes were still closed.

"Hey," she pitched her voice so as not to startle him. "Stone. I think we're here."

His instant response told her that he had not been sleeping. "Good."

Eve undid her seatbelt and started to open the door.

"Wait," Stone said. "Before we go in, we need to talk."

Oh, shit. Reluctantly, Eve eased the door closed and sat back in her seat. Her empty stomach gave a sickening lurch. Because she did not have anything to do with her hands, which showed a distressing tendency to shake, she held onto the steering wheel again.

She could feel Stone's eyes on her now. But she did not look at him.

"What is it?" she asked, although she did not want to know.

"Colonel Baird," Stone's voice was determined. "Eve. You don't have to tell me any details about what happened between you and my cousin. But I need to know one thing."

Eve had realized some version of this conversation was coming. She had been dreading it from the moment she had heard Eliot Spencer's name.

"You can ask," she said, massaging her temples in a vain attempt to stave off a tension headache. Her grammar was very precise. He could ask, but she did not guarantee him an answer. Jacob Stone would understand the nuance. Taking a deep breath and clenching her fists at her sides, she faced him and braced for whatever he would say next.

"Eliot and I were just kids the last time I saw him, just out of high school," he said, his face more serious than she ever remembered seeing it, his voice low and rough with emotion. "I realize now that he became a very different person from the cousin I once knew, and that person did some terrible things. So tell me true, Eve." He held out his hand as if he might brush the back of her hand with his fingertips, but he did not touch her. "Is there anything that Eliot Spencer did to you that requires that I go back to the Brew Pub tonight and kill him."

Eve felt her heart crack. Of course. In that moment she desired nothing more than to throw herself into the arms of this splendid, honorable man and weep. He wanted to know if his cousin had raped her. And if it were so, no family loyalty would supersede his commitment to her.

"No! Oh, no! Jacob, it wasn't anything like that," Eve exclaimed reaching to grip his outstretched hand. "I swear. We met as combatants, on opposite sides of both the fight and the law. But it was a fair fight. He gave me no more and no less quarter than he would a man. And I lost. I lost spectacularly, my entire team, in fact." Tears stung her eyes now. "They all died, and I—I nearly did."

Her voice betrayed her and ended in a sob.

"Oh, Eve," Stone said. "I am so sorry." And then, shifting over into the awkward gap between the seats, he drew her into the circle of his arms, warm and secure, like her father used to.

Eve clung to him as if he were his namesake, solid as granite, while the hurricane of emotions that had been building up all evening overwhelmed her. And he simply held her while she shook and sobbed, drenching his shirt with her tears.

She did not know how long he sat in what must have been extreme discomfort, rocking her gently, allowing her to break apart against him like a storm surge against a cliff. But finally, she grew still, spent and empty and numb. For a long time she simply rested there listening to the steady rhythm of his heartbeat, feeling a sort of peace slow the race of her pulse and calm the unevenness in her breathing.

Only when she started to move again did Stone shift forward and fetch a box of tissues from down beside the gearshift. Still holding her with one arm, he gently wiped the tears and mucous from her face as if she were a small child.

Suddenly self-conscious, Eve pushed herself away from him, straightening up in her seat. Grabbing a handful of tissues, she scrubbed at her face, trying to wipe away more than just the damp.

"Well, that was embarrassing." She sniffed, not looking at Stone.

From where he had returned to his own seat, Stone's voice came warm with his smile, "It didn't happen."

Once again, Eve wondered what alchemy had gone into the making of Jacob Stone. Whatever it was, she was so very grateful.

"Then, I think we should go in, now," Eve said, realizing she was completely exhausted. She made herself look at Stone.

He nodded at her, respecting her desire to leave behind what they had had just shared. "Let's go then."

* * *

><p>TBC<p> 


	13. Chapter 13

Title: By Paths Coincident 13/?

Author: Honorat

Rating: T

Characters: Jenkins, Eve Baird, Jacob Stone, Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, Parker, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Damien Moreau, Chapman, Lamia, Others TBA as needed.

Pairing: Parker/Hardison, Cassandra/Jake, Cassandra/Eliot, just a touch of Eliot/OC

Disclaimer: Dean Devlin, John Rogers, TNT own these characters.

Description: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren't the only members of the two teams who've met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark.

By Paths Coincident

Cassandra closed the door of her apartment and leaned back against it.

When she had flown from Heathrow to PDX, she had left her life behind in New York. Nothing in her previous apartment had held meaning for her because that had been where she had done her best to forget who she was and who she could have been. She'd had her roommate send a suitcase with her clothes and told her to keep whatever else she wanted or give it away.

This little studio apartment was hers, in a way no other place had been. When she had told Jake that she had never had a kid's bedroom, he had looked at her with pitying astonishment and, in spite of the awkward tension of those early days, immediately piled her and Ezekiel into his pickup and taken her shopping at every quaint or quirky interior design shop Ezekiel could find in Portland.

Instead of ignoring her synaesthesia, Jake had drawn her to talk about how the colors had sounded to her, what the shapes smelled like, what numbers she saw, what different textures made her feel. It had been such an astonishing experience for her. All her life people had treated her as though she were broken, as though speaking of her disability was painful for them, as though her very existence made them uncomfortable. But Jake had reacted as if her cross-wired brain had simply created a far greater depth and height and breadth to the ways she could perceive and appreciate art. For the first time she had tried to see herself through his eyes—as more rather than less, as a person uniquely gifted rather than horribly cursed. Like a blind man creating a masterpiece, Jake had coaxed her into describing sensations he could not feel or see or hear so that he could paint her room with them.

Cassandra found most places full of jarring and competing sensory bombardment, but this space she could now slip into like a comforting robe, her frayed nerves easing into peace, her fragmented sense of self coalescing into wholeness.

Now her room rioted with botanical murals blending into blackboard on which she could chalk math equations to her heart's content. A light that looked like a glittering atom hung from the center of the room, and her walls were decorated with framed prints of scientific art from classical illustrations to images from scanning electron microscopes. Her bed was covered in plush versions of the weirdest animals the boys could find—an octopus, a wombat, and an iguana were her favorites. The three of them had spent a day at the Oregon Zoo before descending on the gift store like a hoard of locusts.

Jake had even used his landlady's deceased husband's workshop to put together a set of hexagonal shelves painted to match the mural with some of them plastered with pages from mathematical textbooks. Cassandra, who had no idea what had happened to her childhood collections, had purchased a fossil to sit on one shelf as the seed for a new collection.

She had once again a desk and table for her computer and lab work. Some days she would just hold up each beaker and retort and even the lowly test tubes to watch the light glow through them and take deep breaths of cinnamon and cardamom.

In one corner she had an overly enthusiastic Boston fern that was trying to take over the room, and in another, she had a fish tank, burbling away, that she was fairly certain Ezekiel had stolen for her, with guppies and neon tetras and sword tails and one snail that had somehow become one hundred. The multi-colored fish, swirling with such complex patterns, could mesmerize her with the equations they made, each minute a new secret. Along the counter of her small kitchen, she had a parade of chubby cacti, whose protective prickles created a design that always made Cassandra laugh when she ran their equations. Jake had looked at her wistfully and told her he wished he could hear the jokes that a cactus told.

Cassandra always felt surrounded by herself in this room in ways she never had before. Which was a good thing, because she wanted to curl up in the zebra-striped chair Jake had found for her at an antique store after the debacle of the Apple of Discord, and hug her pillow printed with the periodic table information for the element Carbon, and cry.

The evening had been a traumatic one, with the still unexplained tension between Colonel Baird and Jake's cousin, the violent interruption of the Serpent Brotherhood, and Jake's frightening head injury. But that wasn't the worst of it.

Her heart was breaking for Jake, and there was nothing she could do for him. That fact hurt. She had been so grateful to Eliot for taking care of his cousin, for letting her assist. But she knew Jake would never have asked for her help. He was such a caring person, but since that time she had betrayed the Library, there had always been a thin layer of ice between them. When she had spent time in Prince Charming's skin, she had thought that, instead of the Huntsman, the Fairy Tale could as easily have made Jacob Stone into Snow White—trapped in a glass box with his heart poisoned. But she had lost the right to be the prince who could remove that barrier.

He had told her that family wasn't ever easy, but tonight she had seen how much he cared for his cousin, how much fun they had had as boys together. And now, just when she had thought he might have found a family member he could be himself around, he had discovered that Eliot Spencer, like everyone else in his life, could not be trusted.

Even in the shadowed interior of the truck, with only the illumination of street lights, the look in Jake's eyes as he had listened to Ezekiel's litany of crimes that Eliot had committed had been wrenching, moving from angry disbelief to stunned shock to coldest rage and ending in a profound and anguished horror.

Cassandra herself found it hard to believe that Eliot Spencer with his charming smile and his healer's hands could be the cold-blooded killer Ezekiel had described. And yet she had watched him fight The Serpent Brotherhood with a skill that went beyond terrifying. Although she had to admit that, at the time, since Eliot had been defending them, it had also been rather thrilling to watch the ease with which he had annihilated their enemies.

But Colonel Baird's reaction to Eliot had new meaning in light of Ezekiel's information. Cassandra had never seen Baird so thoroughly traumatized. Even when she'd been a princess, their dauntless Guardian had been no damsel in distress. She might have trilled songs and batted her eyes, but she kicked off her high heels and fought fearlessly even with her curtailed skills. What then could have happened to make her respond to Eliot Spencer with more fear than she had to a Minotaur?

Cassandra was fairly certain she did not want to know.

She wished she could have volunteered to spend the night with both Eve and Jake. She had wanted so much to be able to comfort Jake. But she was sure her presence tonight would only be a reminder that everyone always betrayed him. So she had seconded Colonel Baird's plan to send her home. No need for math in patching up broken hearts.

Still clutching the element Carbon to her chest, Cassandra tried to breathe deeply, running the periodical table through her mind, all those beautiful numbers, neutrons and protons and ions, atomic weights, and valence levels, until she disappeared into the swirl of color and music, and they flickered about her like spinning universes.

Alec Hardison sat alone in the briefing room, his laptop screen the only light illuminating his face. Windows and tabs opened under his searching touch so rapidly they flickered like a movie.

Eliot had gone wherever Eliot went when he got thunderous and surly. And Parker was . . . ah, that was a very faint rustle, far up in the vaulted ceiling. Sure enough, with the zipping hiss of rope and harness, Parker floated down over the desk like a very large and entirely gorgeous spider. She hovered just off the surface, rotating slowly, a bowl of loudly colored cereal and milk in one hand. Balancing on the rope by hooking it with her elbow, she maneuvered her spoon with her other hand.

"Didn't you get enough to eat tonight?" Hardison asked mildly, his hands slowing their dance over the keys, but not stopping.

"Yes," said Parker with the total lack of comprehension that still could surprise him. Parker's out-of-phase view of the world was a constant source of delight to Hardison.

"Then why the cereal?" Hardison gestured at the bowl.

"There is no 'why' about cereal," Parker said, wrinkling her nose and reversing her spin. "'Why' is for vegetables. Eliot knows all the 'why's'. Because iron, or because beta carotene, or because fiber. I just like things that have no reason."

Hardison shrugged. When she put it that way, it made perfect sense. Parker usually did, when she explained. Sometimes he thought maybe Parker was the only sane one, and all the rest of the world was crazy.

"What are you doing?" Parker asked, landing on the desk and scooting over without using her hands to peer at the computer screen.

Hardison took a moment to appreciate the aesthetics of the wiggling that maneuver involved before answering, "Does anyone think some really weird shit went down with Eliot tonight?"

"Are you talking about the NATO Colonel, Eliot's cousin, or that woman with the sword and her gang?" Parker asked, shovelling cereal into her mouth with rapt concentration.

"All of the above," Hardison said. "I started with the people with knives and guns because I wanna know who's comin' after Eliot, and I ain't got nothin'."

Which was nothing but the truth, and that was baffling. "I mean they are nowhere in my world. Eliot called them The Serpent Brotherhood, but nobody's talkin' about 'em, nobody's tweetin' about 'em, they don't have a webpage or anything. They got no accounts, no news articles. I've got searches runnin' with facial recognition, but with Eliot's enemies, that pretty much means coverin' the entire planet, so I doubt I'll get much for a few hours, unless they been operatin' long in Portland. But if some of Eliot's old buddies were runnin' game here in town, you'd think he'd have said somethin'."

Parker set down her empty bowl and launched herself into a slow swing around Hardison so that she could see what he was doing and flop her arms over his shoulders. Hardison readjusted her so that he wasn't in danger of being strangled and continued to caress his keyboard. Things were getting a little tricky now.

"That's the NATO person," Parker pointed out, putting a sugar-dusted fingerprint on his screen.

"Woman!" Hardison exclaimed in exasperation. "Do not combine cereal dandruff with my laptop! Yes, that's Colonel Eve Baird. I thought she was the next most important problem. Any time the law comes gunning for one of us, we end up burnin' through aliases and blowin' up offices. Now I need t'concentrate, because hackin' NATO ain't no walk in the park."

Parker could be a monumental pest when she was in the mood, but she knew when to leave Hardison in peace. She patted his head, then zipped back up her rope, and for a while, he could hear the quiet clinks and swishes of her swinging about the rafters.

But then the systems put in place to prevent just such intrusions as his demanded his full attention and all background activity faded from his awareness. Several hours later, he was sweating and breathing as though he had been running, but he was in. He had all the files on one Eve Baird, Colonel. And damn. This was worse than he had feared.

He nearly jumped out of his skin when Parker's voice breathed in his ear. "What's wrong?"

"Jiminy Christmas, Parker! You tryin' t'kill me, girl?"

"You found something," Parker said. "I want to know what."

Taking a few deep breaths to settle his pulse, Hardison transferred the view on his screen to the large bank of screens on the wall as if this were only another case.

"Colonel Eve Baird," he said in his briefing-the-team voice. "Born Decemeber 24, 1972."

"Ooooh! Christmas Eve!" Parker exclaimed.

"Yeah, wonder if she ever forgave her parents for that name. Anyway, she grew up on a variety of army bases. Went to West Point—transcripts are all 4.0."

"Hot and smart," Parker said.

Hardison rolled his eyes. Part of the problem with the pre-human Parker imprinting on him and Eliot was that she had a tendency to talk like she was one of them. Not that he minded if Parker actually did find girls hot, too.

"She's too old for us, Parker," Hardison pointed out.

"But not for Eliot," Parker said.

"Yeah, she's not too much older than him, and he always likes girls that can kick his ass a little, but wait'll you see where they intersect. Now let me finish."

Parker subsided.

"She went on to complete her Military Intelligence training at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Then she was recruited for Delta Force counter-terrorism. From there, she joined NATO counter-terrorism. And here's where it gets interesting. You see, eleven years ago, Captain Eve Baird was given a mission to break up a shipment of nuclear materials through Spain being orchestrated by none other than Damien Moreau."

Parker made her disgust face. "Blech."

"Eleven years ago." Hardison paused significantly but Parker looked blank, so he explained. "Back when we realized goin' up against Moreau meant goin' up against Eliot's past, I did a bit of diggin', and that would have been right in the middle of the time he was doin' all kinds of crazy bad shit for Moreau."

"Uh oh."

"Uh oh, is right. Baird's whole team was killed, the shipment was lost, and Baird herself ended up hospitalized. And get this. That team was armored and armed to the teeth, but they were taken out by one man with knives. Sound like anyone we know?"

Parker's eyes were wide with comprehension. She nodded soberly.

"They didn't have enough evidence to convict, but I'm guessing they must have had a pretty good idea, because Baird sure reacted to Eliot's name."

"What did he do to her?" Parker asked quietly.

They'd always known Eliot had a dark and violent past, but they had never met any of his victims except for General Flores and Toby, both of whom Eliot had spared. Colonel Eve Baird was a reminder that Eliot hadn't just killed and hurt other bad guys.

"She was medically discharged after that, and didn't re-enlist for three years. I hacked the hospital's records, which was a damn sight easier than NATO's, let me tell you. And Eliot left her with a coma, a fractured skull, a crushed larynx, a perforated abdomen with resulting peritonitis, and, as if that wasn't bad enough, a couple of cases of death. She flat-lined twice before they got her stabilized. Also, her therapist bills look like the national debt, so I'm guessing a raging case of PTSD, too."

"Poor Eliot," Parker said even more quietly.

Hardison knew she wasn't dismissing what Eliot had done to Baird but imagining what having that on his conscience was doing to Eliot.

"Is that why she's just working as a security guard for an archive now?" Parker asked.

That was actually a good question, because Baird was merely on transfer from NATO. Hardison looked up the Metropolitan Library. And drew a blank. As far as he could tell, there was no such organization in Portland. And the New York library seemed to have no actual connection to Portland. Payroll taxes were being withheld, but no information was available for her place of employment. He quickly looked up the other members of the archive.

"They were all hired around the same time, in New York. But they've apparently only worked from here. And who the hell pays their taxes in Roman denarii?"

"And who hires a thief to work in an archive containing rare art?" Parker asked.

"Ah, yes. Ezekiel Jones. Maybe they don't know he's a thief?" Hardison had come across Jones' work a few times in the last several years. The kid had game, that was for sure. "Well, if he's on the heist, should we let them know?"

Parker shrugged. "Anyone with that crappy of background checks deserves to get robbed."

She had a point.

"Does this mean we're going to have to leave?" Parker asked. "If Baird knows who Eliot was?"

"I doubt she can bring a case against him now, any more than they could back then," Hardison said. "I'm more worried about him."

"Because he feels guilty." Parker nodded. As always, she and Eliot seemed to understand each other.

"Yeah. And because, if she wants some kind of revenge, I'm afraid he'll just let her. I don't even know where he's disappeared to right now."

"He's on the roof," Parker said.

"In the rain?" Hardison asked. "Never mind. He'd probably prefer it was hail. The man missed his century—he should have lived in the Middle Ages with self-flagellation and hair shirts."

"He let his cousin get hurt," Parker said. "You know how he gets when one of us gets hurt."

Eliot Spencer sat in Parker's favorite spot on the roof of the building which housed the Brew Pub looking out on the jeweled loveliness that was Portland on a rainy night. It was 52 degrees out and he was beginning to feel chilled as the water dripping from his unruly curls seeped down his neck. He tipped his head back, letting the rain beat against his face, welcoming the physical discomfort because it took the edge off his mental discomfort.

Eliot did not often find himself forced to admit that he had no idea what to do, but he seemed to have arrived at that point now. He felt like a planet with three continents that had just collided—shaken to his very foundation. When the plates of the earth's crust ground against each other, mountain ranges rose up, and he could feel their razored peaks slicing through his heart. He had sacrificed to keep his worlds separate—had given up his family, his identity—but apparently that had not been enough to appease the vengeful Furies.

How had he managed so thoroughly to fuck up everything he had ever cared about? He remembered the moment he had first known that he could never go home again, never contact anyone he had loved. For a long time he hadn't gone home because of the fight with his father, but he had spent a couple of Christmases with Jake's family when he got leave from the Service. Then there had been Aimee. He'd gone home to her in between jobs, until the one when he hadn't made it out for three months, and then he'd been recovering for another three, and she'd finally tired of waiting and moved on. Eventually the work he was doing was so far over the line he hadn't wanted to carry that shit home on his boots. But that moment when he had first accepted a contract to kill a man's family as a warning from Damien Moreau, and he had realized what his family risked by being connected to someone in his line of work, that was when he had known that he not only would not go home, he could not.

His family. They were only safe so long as no one knew they were in any way connected to him. Jake had always been a problem, because his relationship with Eliot was undeniable, and he could be mistaken for his cousin. But Jake had been safely stuck at home in a town with one traffic light and no video surveillance, and he had seemed likely to stay there, even if he'd never married and settled down like most of his siblings and cousins, thanks to his father's drunken unthriftiness and the resultant responsibility of supporting his family.

Eliot had had a bad six months when Jake had hied himself off to Alaska to work on some stupid pipeline, but at least that had been a remote location of no value to international criminals, and when the job had ended, Jake had returned, like a ball on an elastic string, to his home town, and he hadn't left since. So what the hell was he doing working as an archivist in Portland, having obviously filed off the shackle that was his father's business? And how in hell was Eliot going to keep him safe now? He'd already done a piss poor job of that. Not two hours from the moment Jake had reunited with his errant cousin, he had already been caught in the crossfire between Eliot and some very old enemies.

Eliot rubbed his fingers together still feeling the phantom stains of Jake's blood on his hands. This—this was his worst nightmare. He did not mind suffering the consequences of his own folly, but that his family should feel one minute's worth of the pain that Eliot alone deserved? That, he could not endure.

He had known he risked such a consequence with the Leverage team, too. But the one time he had tried to leave them, for their own good, he had realized it was already too late. Somehow, that broken bunch of misfit fellow criminals had become his family, and he could find no way to take back the love that had somehow escaped and attached itself to them. He didn't have any trouble calling it love these days, although it had taken him a few years to admit that was what it had been. So Eliot had done the next best thing to leaving. He had stayed with them. If he were always there to protect them, surely they would be safe.

It had worked. But only because Nate was a devious, manipulative bastard, Sophie was a chameleon with hypnotic powers, Parker was a bloody menace with the gift of invisibility, or so it seemed, and Hardison . . . well Hardison had at least finally learned how to punch somebody, and he had to admit that the man could destroy anyone whose life in any way depended upon a computer. They trusted Eliot to take care of them, but this family could hold its own against Eliot's enemies as they had proven when they'd gone up against the most formidable of them—Damien Moreau. God, he still couldn't believe that they'd taken that bastard down. Although Eliot continued to check once a month to see that he was staying down.

But Jake, who had always fought with more enthusiasm than science, Jake, who had not the least clue about the kind of evil Eliot's enemies were capable of, Jake who was likely even now being informed by his colleague of what an untrustworthy and unworthy piece of human refuse his cousin was—how in the name of God was he going to protect Jake?

He was going to have to tell Jake the truth. The only thing worse than Jake knowing what his cousin had become was for him to walk the same world as Eliot ignorant of all the vengeance hovering in wait for the perfect moment to swoop down and exact payment for his sins from Eliot Spencer or any reasonable facsimile. Even Eliot's good deeds were now a threat to Jake, because Leverage had created an even more powerful set of enemies.

And he was going to have to talk to Colonel Eve Baird. If she was security where Jake worked, perhaps she could protect him in Eliot's stead. At least, if she knew the likely directions from which an attack might arrive, she might stand a chance. She had the training to be a formidable opponent. But would she even listen to a man like him?

Eliot buried his head in his hands, the rain driving against his back like a scourge. He had scarcely been damaged by the fight with The Serpent Brotherhood, but his gut radiated pain as though he had been taking direct hits for hours. What could he even say to Eve Baird? He could offer her no compensation for what he had taken from her. He could not beg her to spare him whatever vengeance she felt was due. His only hope was that if she demanded his death—a life for so many other lives—she would allow him to make it as public and splashy and worthy of headlines on new services around the world as possible, so that all his enemies would call off their dogs and leave Jacob Stone in peace.

TBC


	14. Chapter 14

Title: By Paths Coincident 14/?

Author: Honorat

Rating: T

Characters: Jenkins, Eve Baird, Jacob Stone, Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, Parker, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Damien Moreau, Chapman, Lamia, Others TBA as needed.

Pairing: Parker/Hardison, Cassandra/Jake, Cassandra/Eliot, just a touch of Eliot/OC

Disclaimer: Dean Devlin, John Rogers, TNT own these characters.

Description: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren't the only members of the two teams who've met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark.

By Paths Coincident

* * *

><p>Eliot heard Parker scramble out onto the roof. The fact that he could hear her in spite of the rain meant she wanted him to know she was there. He would have preferred being alone, but Parker had no respect for privacy. Hell, bacteria had more respect for privacy than Parker.<p>

"Hey, Eliot!" she called from over by the chicken coop, flipping on the area light.

Eliot squinted in the sudden glare as the world off the edge of the roof turned black, streaked with silver rain. Parker looked like a drowned creature, her hair soaked and hanging in seaweed-like strands. Just how long had she been out here before she made enough noise to alert him?

"Do you wanna help me steal the eggs?"

He was not going to be able to ignore her. City girl Parker never got tired of pickpocketing eggs from the chickens. Since she didn't usually share this chore, Eliot knew she was worried about him, and this was her way of asking if he was all right. If it had been Hardison interrupting him, he would have had no compunction at telling him where he could stuff his concern, but this was Parker.

Eliot resigned himself to reassuring his thief that he was perfectly fine. Getting to his feet with a twinge of muscles too long inactive in the cold, he joined Parker.

She did not, of course, have a basket. Parker collected eggs like she lifted necklaces off wealthy dowagers at embassy balls—you never saw her do it, and you never saw the eggs. Eliot had honestly tried to catch her at it, but Parker could lift an egg from under a hen so that the old biddy never even noticed. She would arrive in the kitchen, and the eggs would appear. Eliot always expected to find Parker oozing yolks and broken shells, but she never lost an egg. He had about come to the conclusion that she had an extra-dimensional space tucked away in her pocket where she stashed her loot.

Eliot only kept a few hens on the roof, enough to give him eggs for personal meals and to keep the bugs off his garden while adding a little fertilizer. The Brew Pub purchased its eggs from a local farmer after Eliot had assured himself that the hens were free range. He had bought these particular chickens with Parker in mind—an eclectic mix of Araucanas and Easter Eggers, so she could find colored eggs, and a couple of Silkies because he thought their fuzzy heads and feet would make her laugh. The Silkies worked far better than he could have hoped. Not only did Parker nearly sprain something the first time she saw them, scaring the poor things out of a change of feathers with her snorts of laughter, but she had the same reaction to them every time she saw them. "They look like David Bowie in Labyrinth," she said, and they kind of did. Her forays into the chicken coop were always punctuated by joyous cackling. Eliot never got tired of hearing her; Parker's laugh was one of the things that let a little sunshine into his darkness.

Not having Parker's talent for pickpocketing chickens, Eliot grabbed a basket and, making his way among the raised beds of his garden, joined her at the coop. Flipping on the low watt light, they ducked in the door. The roosting hens rustled at the interruption. Eliot could sympathize. Together, he and Parker collected the eggs, Parker stealing them and giggle-snorting at the Silkies, Eliot simply reaching under the hens and putting the eggs in his basket.

He'd done this when he was a child, with his mama. But these hens were far different from the giant black and white Plymouth Rock chickens his mama had loved. Eliot preferred not to be reminded. He didn't really know what he believed about an afterlife, except that if there was a hell, he was going to it, but he hoped that wherever his mama was, she couldn't see what her son had become.

When they emerged from the chicken coop, Parker skipped off, dancing from the edge of one raised-frame garden bed to another. Eliot had visions of yolks and shells, but he should have known better.

She stopped by the bed that was hers. Parker was making an attempt to learn to garden. It had been Eliot's idea when he had decided to transfer some of his home gardening to the Brew Pub rooftop. Both Parker and Hardison thought that real food came in boxes and plastic packs from grocery stores supplemented by things that came in cardboard and Styrofoam from restaurants. While Hardison had refused to detach from his technology or go anywhere near actual dirt, Parker had been game to try. Perhaps she would eat vegetables more often if she grew them herself.

Eliot had involved Parker from the start. She had helped him build the frameworks for the raised bed. This had proved to be a bit reckless since Parker had loved the skill saw and had destroyed several board feet of lumber cutting it up for fun. When they had filled the bed with dirt, compost from the kitchen, and peat moss, Parker had been extremely dubious that anything edible could emerge from such an environment. Eliot had selected seeds that he judged would grow fast enough to keep her attention. Parker had looked at him like she expected he was pulling her leg when he informed her that the tiny, round, dark, hard thing had a plant inside it.

Nevertheless the garden had finally been sown and all that remained was waiting. Eliot had caught Parker up on the roof several times staring at the barren soil as if she thought she could inspire it to do something.

"This is really, really boring," she'd told him.

"It takes time, Parker," Eliot had said, grinning at her impatience.

Tonight, she was finally rewarded.

"Eliot! Come see!" Parker called.

"What is it?" he asked.

Parker was crouched over her garden. "Something's growing!" she exclaimed. "Look!"

Unable to resist the half a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth, Eliot joined Parker in kneeling by the wooden box, staring down at the expanse of soaked, black earth from which a green shoot was emerging.

"You got a zucchini there," he informed her.

Parker frowned at the plants. "It doesn't look like zucchini." At least she had progressed to knowing what a zucchini was.

"That's because it's just a baby," Eliot said. "It'll grow up and make flowers, and the flowers will turn into zucchinis, but maybe we'll make some into fried squash blossoms."

"Really?" Parker scrutinized her future crop again. "You're sure?"

"Positive," Eliot assured her. "Happens every time."

"How?" asked Parker.

Eliot shrugged. "Just does. Add rain and sunlight, and the plant grows."

"It's funny," said Parker, "how we filled that box with rotten stuff and then the chickens pooped on it, and we buried a seed in it, all covered in dirt, but look how clean and green it is now." She raked her slim fingers through the wet soil, scooping up a handful and letting it drop through her fist. Holding out her stained hand towards Eliot, she asked. "How does something clean come out of something so dirty?"

The two of them knelt side by side in silence, watching the rain gather up the dirt and rearrange it on Parker's hand but not wash it entirely away even when the water ran off. Finally, Parker scrubbed her hand on her leg, which helped but still left her with dirt under her fingernails. She reached out with one finger and poked at the green sprout with her thief-delicate touch.

"Weird," she said. Then she looked at Eliot with those wise-child eyes that always made him realize just how extraordinary Parker could be. "I think, maybe it just had to grow toward the light."

Eliot thought he stopped breathing. Parker was the most literal person he knew, but he could not lose the impression that she was not talking about plants anymore. Parker kept staring at him, her eyebrows drawing together in a bit of a frown as though he were a lock she couldn't quite pick, and she was searching for the right tumblers to drop.

Suddenly, she leaned in and laid her chin on his shoulder. "Haven't you added enough rain yet, Eliot?" she whispered in his ear. "You're awfully wet."

Then she bounced to her feet and exited the rooftop without saying another word.

Eliot stayed kneeling there as though she had knocked the wind out of him with a two by six.

* * *

><p>Eve let Stone lead the way, following closely in case he faltered, up the steps from the sidewalk, then around the side of the house.<p>

"This," said Stone with a brief burst of enthusiasm, "is an early 20th century American Craftsman Bungalow. It's pretty run down, now, but the interior woodwork is good. A lot of it got painted." His voice took on the tones of disgust usually reserved for raw sewage. It was well for the dastardly wielders of paintbrushes that they had long since departed for other parts. "But Mrs. Anderson told me I could do whatever I wanted with my room so long as I didn't burn down the house. Took me the whole first month, all my spare time, to strip the paint and the carpet—can you believe they put carpet tacks in a hardwood floor?"

Eve couldn't help smiling. Jacob Stone on an art-and-architecture rampage was fast becoming something she treasured. How strange that this little band of eccentric geniuses for which she had accidentally become responsible had become so woven into her heart.

They reached the back porch door, and Stone fumbled through his keys to unlock it. Holding it open, he ushered Eve inside.

The entry area was dark, but light glowed from somewhere in the front of the house. The faint sound of a television drifted back to them. A warbley, elderly voice called out, "Is that you, Jacob?"

"It is, ma'am," Stone called back. "Things went a little late at work. I brought a friend home, Colonel Baird, who needs a place to stay for the night. Just wanted you to know so you wouldn't worry if you heard I wasn't alone upstairs."

"That's fine, honey. Your friends are welcome any time," the voice said.

"Good night then," Stone said.

"Good night, dear."

Giving Eve a conspiratorial grin, Stone bent over to pull off his boots. That proved to be a mistake, and Eve had to steady him as he aborted the maneuver.

"I think I need to sit down," Stone said, his voice a bit breathless.

"Here's a seat thingy," Eve said, spotting what looked like a bench and helping Stone toward it.

"That'll do." Stone did not try to shake off her help which told her he must be feeling much worse than he was letting on.

"Oops, doily," she said before he could sit, snatching the crocheted item from the seat before Stone sagged onto it.

"There are," he said tiredly, "doilies on every possible surface of this house, a charming domestic artifact in the singular, or possibly even in the dozens, but becomin' tedious in the hundreds. I have not yet succeeded in convincin' the mistress of the house to set up a cottage industry and let me hawk them at the local farmers' market, but I have faith that I may yet carry the day."

Eve laughed. "My grandmother used to crochet blankets. Every member of her extended family had one. If she hadn't given them away, I think she would have buried her house in them."

"I wonder what our grandkids will say about our idiosyncrasies?" Stone asked.

Startled at the very thought of grandchildren, Eve stared at him. Although the fact that Stone made those assumptions about his own life shouldn't surprise her. He was a deeply traditional man from a conservative part of the country. Of course he visualized a picket fence sort of future. She wondered how magic was going to factor into that.

Eve herself had always imagined she'd end up a battle axe of a Brigadier General if she survived. She'd never considered raising her own military brats. Of course, Flynn might have his own ideas . . . and if it wasn't far too soon to be thinking about children when they'd only been around each other twice since they'd met. She was relieved that Stone did not continue the subject.

"Well," he said. "Once more with the safety net . . ." Taking a deep breath, he started to lean over.

"Wait," Eve stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. "Let me."

"I don't need t'be babied," Stone growled.

"Look, you just clobbered your head. How about I agree to let you baby me once in the future in exchange?" Eve said kneeling in front of him and taking a hold of his boot.

Stone paused in the middle of trying to pull his foot away and eyed her consideringly, "Okay, it's a deal, but I get to pick."

Eve figured she was probably going to regret that bargain. She eased the well-worn boots off Stone's feet—a much easier task now that he was cooperating instead of resisting. Then, because she figured she'd better observe the house rules, she took off her own shoes, setting them in a neat row beside Stone's boots.

Getting to her feet, she held out her hands. "Up you get, cowboy."

For a wonder, he let her help him up without protest. She could tell his energy was flagging.

"One more flight of stairs," he sighed. "If I'd've known what kind of a job this was, I might have picked a ground floor room."

The entrance to the back staircase led off the entryway. The two of them padded up the slippery wooden steps in stocking feet.

"I feel like I'm fifteen and being smuggled into a boy's bedroom," Eve whispered.

"Little bit of a wild thing when you were a girl, eh?" He paused on the landing, where the stairs took a right-angled turn, to catch his breath, and she did not think it was because of the steepness of the climb.

He looked up the remaining stairs. "Once more unto the breach, dear friends . . ."

Gathering his determination and gripping the handrail, Stone made it the rest of the way to his door. Opening it, he flipped on the light and gestured for Eve to precede him.

Eve didn't really know what she had expected Stone's place to look like—perhaps something Western themed or looking like a boy's dormitory room. But this—this was like stepping back into the past. The first impression was of wood—beautifully re-finished wooden beams spanning the ceiling, heavy wood moldings framing the doorways and windows. The windows surrounded the room on three sides, looking out over the trees and the strip of industrial buildings to the Willamette River. A set of French doors opened onto a small balcony. The walls glowed a dull gold lit by period light fixtures. The floor was also hardwood, with a threadbare, antique rug in the sitting area. The furniture was obviously second hand but was wood-framed and leather with colourful cushions—what man concerned himself with cushions?

And she thought, of course. Given the chance to create his own space, Jacob Stone would make a work of art.

The art on the walls was not as prolific as she had expected, but she realized that every piece was original. And there were books—several tall bookshelves full, as well as stacks on the roll-top computer desk. Stone had been making up for lost time. A wrought iron bedstead stood in the corner opposite the seating area, the quilt on it likely handmade. There were even a few plants.

"This," she breathed, "this is beautiful."

Stone smiled at her a little shyly. "It was a bit of a wreck when I started, but I kinda like how it turned out."

Eve noticed he was looking pale. "You'd better sit down," she said. "Before you fall down."

"I think I will," he agreed. He made it to a chair on his own, but basically collapsed into it.

"Can you tell me what you're feeling?" Eve asked

"Head hurts. Just a little light headed. Maybe a little queasy. Can you turn on that table lamp and then switch off the lights. It's too bright in here."

"Okay, I'm going to get you some water and some more Tylenol. Can you tell me where it is?" Eve asked, just a little worried.

"Bathroom. Cabinet behind the mirror." Stone waved a hand in the direction of the only enclosed space in the room next to where the stairs came up. Tucked into the corner next to the bathroom was a tiny kitchenette.

Eve dimmed the lights as he'd requested and hunted down the Tylenol. Two for Stone and two for her. The headache wasn't going away. She found glasses in the single cupboard in the kitchenette and filled them with water. Swallowing her own painkillers, she set her glass back down on the counter and brought the other to Stone.

"If this doesn't have you feeling a little better in 45 minutes, let me know," she said as he took the medication.

Something alive came out from under the chair and wrapped itself around Eve's ankle, startling a squeak out of her.

A large, extremely fluffy feline of the black and white persuasion leapt from her leg into Stone's lap, butting its head under his hand and setting up a rattling vibration.

"That was the most adorably girly noise I've ever heard you make," Stone said. "And I'm includin' the princess singin'."

Eve glared at him. "Terrorists, I'm fine with. Minotaurs, I can take 'em. Things that grab my legs out of dark places—not good."

"This," said Stone, "is Thomas the Cat. Not Tom. Not Tommy. Definitely not Kitty. He has far too much dignity and insists on his full title. Thomas the Cat, this is Colonel Eve Baird."

"Pleased to meet you Thomas the Cat." Eve held out her hand to be sniffed and then rubbed by a deceptively fluffy, hard and insistent head. "He is certainly very large and . . . hairy."

"Since I keep the tangles and burrs out of his fur, clean his litterbox, fill his water bowl, and provide the thumbs to operate the can opener, Thomas the Cat considers me his valet and deigns to sit on my lap and allow me to worship him." Stone scritched his fingers along the cat's spine as the animal arched its back and increased in volume.

"Is he yours?" Eve asked, having never wondered if Stone was the sort of person to keep a pet.

"No, he belongs to my landlady, or she belongs to him. I do chores around here to cover a bit of the rent. Taking care of the cat is one of them. I also mow the lawn, weed the flowerbeds, fix anything that breaks down around here, and take Mrs. Anderson to church, to the senior center, to the hairdresser, to the mall and grocery store, and to her medical appointments. It allows her son, who lives in Seattle, to feel a little better about her living on her own."

"Do you have time for all that?"

"I make the time." Stone shrugged. "Every little bit of economy helps. And if I'm going to be gone, I make arrangements for someone else to fill in."

Eve had never really thought about the discrepancy between the income of a skilled oil rigger and that of a Librarian. Joining the Library had certainly meant a reduction in salary and benefits for her, but what did she have to spend money on anyway? She remembered that Stone had originally rejected the Library's job offer because of his responsibilities. Just because he was no longer living at home did not mean he wasn't still supporting his family. How many people was he taking care of? She realized she knew next to nothing about their art historian. But now she understood why he had shown no interest in even the very moderately priced apartments such as she and Cassandra had rented.

The cat settled itself like a furry lap rug. Stone leaned his head back against his chair and closed his eyes. "You should get somethin' to eat," he said to Eve. "There's sandwich fixings and milk in the fridge."

Eve realized she was starving. She hadn't actually eaten enough to count at the Brew Pub.

Stone's fridge was a tiny, antique sort of thing with an actual latching handle. It was amazing that it still worked. Eve did not want to eat too much this late, but a slice of bread with peanut butter and jelly sounded like comfort food to her.

Returning to the sitting area with her snack, Eve found Stone still resting. Rather than disturb him, she ate in silence, took her dish back to the kitchen sink, washed and dried it, and put it away.

Approaching Stone's chair again, she asked, "How are you feeling?"

"Better. I'm gonna head t'bed," Stone said not opening his eyes. "I don't suppose I can convince you to take the bed while I take the couch?"

"Not a chance," Eve told him firmly.

"You'll find the spare sheets and blankets in the armoire, bottom drawer," Stone pointed in its direction. "You can use one of the pillows off my bed."

Maneuvering himself to his feet, Stone evicted Thomas the Cat from his lap, for which indignity the creature stalked haughtily to the door and disappeared out the cat door installed in it. Stone followed, moving carefully as though afraid his head might fall off, in the direction of the bathroom.

By the time Eve had the couch set up to serve as her bed for the night, Stone had emerged from the bathroom clad in a pair of loose track pants and a t-shirt advertising some sort of motor oil. He made his way slowly over to his bed, turned back the covers, and slid under them. He sighed deeply as his head sunk into the pillow. "Feels good to lie down."

Eve had to resist the urge to go over and tuck him in like a little boy. Instead she took her bag to the bathroom to change into yoga pants and a tank top and brush her teeth. Returning to the room, she thought Stone was already asleep. But when she turned out the table lamp and curled up on the couch, pulling the blankets over herself, she heard his soft voice.

"G'night, Colonel Baird."

"Goodnight, Stone."

Because she was so exhausted, she set her phone alarm to wake her so that she could check on Stone. It turned out she needn't have bothered. Her nightmares were back.

* * *

><p>TBC<p> 


End file.
